


Dragonstone

by Siamesa



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Baby Dragon, Canonical Character Death, Dragons, Gen, Major Character Injury, Sibling Rivalry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-24
Updated: 2016-07-19
Packaged: 2018-05-22 21:54:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6095221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siamesa/pseuds/Siamesa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stannis makes a discovery beneath his hated new castle that will change not just war and politics, but the king's least favorite brother himself.</p><p>Or: The One In Which Stannis Has A Dragon, And It Goes Great At First But Problems Soon Arise.</p><p>Complete.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Dragonstone is empty and miserable.

Half the servants fear to be called traitors.  The other half likely are.  All his knights and lords are Renly’s bannermen now.  The Citadel has yet to send a maester, but he suspects he will despise the man on sight, simply for not being Cressen.

These are not things he knew that he would miss.

And so he walks the blackened halls, the twisting dungeons, the tunnels that end in seawater.  Two days he forgets to eat.  He’s accustomed to hunger, now.

It is there, in the depths, that he finds it.

Shards of dragonglass shatter beneath his boots, as thin as eggshells.  He bends down, and brings the lantern closer.

Something in the darkness keens.

And then his lantern is attacked.

Bat wings, cat claws.  He falls, the dragonglass cutting his hands, and then there is something like a tongue of flame across the lines of blood.

Something very like a tongue of flame.

The dragon clambers over the fallen lantern, pulling its way up his arm.  Settling on his shoulder, it bites his ear.

-

He emerges from the darkness in shock. The hatchling has curled around his neck and shoulder, chirping softly to itself.  He finds himself idly petting its head, for all it digs its claws back into his shoulder in pleasure.   The coal black head is longer and more pointed than a snake’s, with an elongated jaw of teeth that have already left spots of blood across Stannis’s ear and cheek. 

A dragon, a dragon, a dragon – his dragon?  The second seems nearly as preposterous as the first.  He focuses instead on more rational things – the hatchling will want food.  The kitchens, he knows from his wanderings, are not far.

Merely a corner from the kitchen, though, a servant nearly runs into him, then starts and stares.  Stammered apologies – my lord, my lord – turn into screams. 

He can hear more footsteps immediately, and grinds his teeth.  The hatchling digs his claws deeper into Stannis’s shoulder and neck, stretching out his body towards the maidservant and hissing.  Stannis barely opens his mouth before the maid flees.  He squares his shoulders, ignoring the readjusting claws, and prepares to face the approaching footsteps.

“M’lord?”

He recognizes the voice.  Davos Seaworth.  His ship has docked in twice now, sailing between Dragonstone and Cape Wrath.  His sole remaining knight is a common born smuggler, the one man so far who seems not to have realized he gains nothing by following the lord of a barren rock.

Stannis turns.  “Ser Davos.”  He raises an awkward hand to keep the hatchling on his shoulder.

 “Is that- _gods.”_   His smile is a child’s smile, pulling into his cheeks.  His eyes are huge.  “ _Maid and Mother.”_

“A dragon,” says Stannis.  His own voice does scarcely a better job of hiding the awe.  “Dragon, this is Ser Davos.”  The words are preposterous, and he regrets them immediately.  The hatchling clicks its jaws at Seaworth, a motion somewhere between a preen and a bite, and Stannis attempts to steer the conversation back onto practical ground.

“He needs food.”

Ser Davos bows his head, eyes still locked on the dragon.  “Then- oh.  M’lord. The ship-”

Cressen finds them in the kitchens, giving bits of meat to the hatchling to roast, and Stannis realizes, jolting, that this place could almost feel like _home._

-

“Stop that.”

The hatchling gives him a brief glance before setting another piece of parchment aflame.  Stannis snatches it up.

Cressen has found a few- a very few- books and scrolls of dragonlore.  It seems even the Targaryens consigned most of it to dust.  He’s set men to digging out the old dragonpit, but as of yet the hatchling is barely the length of his arm.  Consigning it to the depths can wait.  Instead, there is this little room, the window long-boarded and the door easy to lock.  Cleaning it out had taken barely an hour, even with the hatchling around his neck.

Now, the difficult task begins.  He needs to write his brother.

 _Come to Dragonstone._   No, he doesn’t dare command a king.  _Your presence is requested._   He sounds like an anxious mother.  _I have found a dragon._   Even more impossible in ink.

He wastes three candles on four sentences.  When the work has done, he takes another look at the hatchling.  It slumbers in a nest of parchment, uncaring of the havoc its existence will wreak.

“You need a name,” he tells it, and it twitches slightly in its sleep.

-

Robert comes nearly as soon as the message is sent.  He is off the gilded ship before the ropes are tied, pulling Stannis up from his knees and thumping him on the back.

“Brother!”

“Your Grace.”  Stannis stands awkwardly.  Robert is more overwhelming than ever, looking every inch the king they’d seen in Tywin Lannister.  The sorrow and the war seem to have left him entirely at the news of a dragon.

“None of that.  You’re worse than Ned.”  Something seems to darken in Robert’s eyes, but it’s gone in an instant.  “To your castle!”

Robert bounds up the stairs, but he waits at the barred door.  Stannis opens the locks slowly, struck by a problem.  He ought to whistle, as he’s learned to do, to calm the hatchling.  But inside him, something snaps and tightens at the thought of looking the fool in front of Robert and his trailing lords.

“Stay back,” he snaps at the men who are starting to crowd him.  Three make half a step; the others look to Robert.

“Stay back!  I think the man knows his own dragon.”  At Robert’s bellow, they finally scuttle away.

Stannis breathes out a long, low note.  He hears no response.  With a nod to Robert, Stannis slips inside the barely opened door.

The dragon sits atop the ruined desk, wings curled around himself and eyes bright and narrow.  As Stannis moves towards him, he hisses at the door, then leaps for Stannis’s shoulder.  Claws dig into the velvet he was stupid enough to wear as the dragon regains his balance.

“ _Oh_.”

The door is open.  Robert’s face is alight.  “It’s real.”

Stannis bristles.  “Do you-“  But the accusation withers.  Robert ignores it entirely.

“May I?”  He’s already reaching out a hand.  Maekon stretches his wings.

And he’s going to fly, Stannis knows it.  There is nothing in his life – _nothing_ – that his brother will not take from him.  Dragons are for kings.

The hatchling resettles.  He regards Robert’s hand with interest, and Stannis’s worries abruptly change shape.

“Your grace, he’s going to-“

There is a snap of flame.  Robert jerks back, and Stannis goes white.

But his brother is laughing.  “A fierce little beast!  A new black dread!”  Robert resettles, still smiling at the dragon, who, assured of an audience, begins to click and preen.  “Not that we’ll name you that, of course.  No old names.  I was thinking Fury.  What do you think of Fury, Stannis?”

“His name is Maekon.”

“Maekon?” Robert scowls in confusion.  “Why?”

 _Because it felt right_ was a terrible explanation even to himself.  He would cut out his tongue before airing it to Robert.

“Our grandmother’s grandfather,” says Stannis eventually. 

Robert sighs.  “A bloody dragon king.”  He would be far less dangerous were he shouting.  Now Stannis can’t read him at all.   Maekon rubs his head against the tension in Stannis’s jaw, the only movement.  After an eternity, Robert speaks again. “Maekar, wasn’t it?  See, I do know something.”

“Father of Aegon V, father of Rhaelle, mother of-“

“Steffon, father, yes, yes.  I get it, _Maester._ ”  Robert holds out his hand to the dragon again.  “A dragon of our blood.  Just don’t yell the bloody name around at court.”

“At _court_ , your Grace?”  He _needs_ this island, now.  Exile has suddenly become safety.

Robert thumps his back, careful to avoid Maekon’s tail.  “Don’t kneel, Lord Stannis, but I’m naming you Master of Ships.”

-

Robert and his men search the tunnels for days, and Stannis watches his brother lose more of his good humor with every dead end.

“We ought to at least bloody well find an egg!”

Stannis refrains from joining the search.  Now he has both Maekon and fleet records as an excuse.  The royal navy is in poor shape, and its bookkeeping in poorer.  Stannis drags his way through what Velaryon deigns to give him.  Maekon nibbles at the edges and swallows one of the seals.

“You can’t go to court yet,” Stannis tells the dragon.  It feels like a lie, but there’s a strange lack of guilt in planning to lie to Robert.  Maekon stays at Dragonstone, and Stannis stays at Dragonstone.  Lord Arryn can send him what he needs of the fleet.  For that matter, Lord Arryn can send him _ships._

-

And so he waits, and reads.  The first trip to court is delayed, and delayed again.  It is still a disaster.

Maekon at first seems thrilled with the ship, flying out as high as his chain will allow, then pulling in low above the water, snatching a fish in his jaws.   His return to the deck to roast his catch, however, is a disaster barely averted.  Finally, Stannis chains him below, and pulls out another stack of naval records to read while the dragon sleeps.

He sleeps very little.

In the end, Stannis and Ser Davos (the latter armed with meat, the only reason Maekon will now tolerate his presence) take it in turns to keep watch.  At least the voyage is short.

On their arrival, Robert proudly presents his plans for a dragonpit, and for further expansions of that pit as more dragons are found or hatched.

“One pit will do for now,” says Stannis.  “And he is still too small.”

Maekon still tries some days to climb his back, and has knocked him over more than once.  Those claws, too, can now do real damage.  Stannis has taken to wearing leathers, even to meet his King.

“A tower room with an open wall and strong chains would do well.”  He’s been planning it for weeks.

Robert looks at him.  Stannis can’t decipher his expression.

“Well then,” Robert bellows to the craftsmen, “get on it!”  He manages to turn it from an order to a cheer. 

-

Maekon grows slowly.  Stannis pours over every old text Cressen can find, and wonders if the new dragonpit is to blame.  By the time Queen Cersei has presented Robert with a son, the dragon that ought to guard his dynasty is still only the size of a small horse.

Stannis leaves Maekon in the half-built open room, and pats at his nose when he hisses.  The beast turns his tail and sulks, and Stannis wonders, not for the first time, if Maekon feeds on his own feelings.  He does not see the point of being formally introduced to an infant, prince or no.

In Joffrey’s cradle is a dragon egg.

The Queen has her hands constantly on them both, encouraging the babe to unclench his fists and touch the glassy scales.  Robert thumps Stannis on the back and utters a number of irrelevant syllables.

“Have you given one to Renly?”  Surely he ought to have been _told._

Robert laughs.  “Jealousy, Stannis?  _Now_?”

Of course Renly has no egg.  They’re more than their weight in gold.  Stannis has spent enough time with Jon Arryn to know that it wasn’t the babe’s _father_ who’d had the gold for this one.  Tywin Lannister wants more than just a king for a grandson.

Maekon snaps idly at him as he returns.

“You may have a brother, dragon,” says Stannis.  _Pray you don’t._

-

Robert had made him a Prince before he’d left Dragonstone, and, as an afterthought, Renly too.  Robert has an heir now, but Stannis is still Prince of Dragonstone.  He will never rule Westeros – he has no desire to rule Westeros, to be fed to the bootlicking masses at court – bar some great tragedy.  But he is a prince.  He has a dragon.

And this has made him a very eligible man indeed.

It is Jon Arryn who most discusses his betrothal. Stannis has acquired a grudging respect for the Hand.  He lays out the matches that have been offered, and the matches that the King prefers.  They are a motley mix.  Younger sisters, aunts and nieces, widows and Freys.

“Delena Florent,” says Arryn, picking up a letter.  “A fair maid, and a fair house.  Your brother seeks a power base against the Tyrells.”

“Lord Florent’s niece.”

“His eldest daughter is wed and his other yet to flower.”

“Daughter to his _youngest_ brother.”

Lord Arryn sighs.

“I know what Robert wants to do, Lord Arryn.  There are no lord’s daughters here save Lord Walder’s.  I am loyal to my death, and he thinks me a traitor.  He _fears_ me a traitor.”  His teeth grind.

“Your grace,” says Lord Arryn, and he uses the words intentionally.  _Prince._   “There are many who leap at the chance to wed a prince of the blood.  Who leap at the thought that their grandson might ride a dragon.”  He shakes his head.  “Your brother would never think you a traitor.  He wishes to protect you from others who might.”

“You have a reputation as an honest man, Lord Arryn.  Don’t sully it.”

Another sigh, though this one he at least tries to cover.  “We need this alliance, your grace.  You, more than anyone, should understand the threat the Tyrells can pose.”

He swallows, tasting blood.  “Very well.”

-

Lord Florent has brought two nieces, and his youngest daughter, clearly hoping for places with the Queen’s ladies.  He and Stannis have a brief conversation, in which Stannis recites phrases he’s learned by rote and suspects Florent is doing the same.

The Florent partys has been at court now for three weeks, weeks Stannis had spent on Dragonstone.  He is ill-prepared to bring home a wife.  He has left Cressen in charge of choosing her chambers and seeing to what servants she might need.  It might be beneath a Maester’s duties, but his steward is flighty, incompetent, and soon to be released from service, and his very brief conversation with the large woman in charge of the maids might as well have been conducted in two difference languages.  He can rely on Cressen.  Cressen had known his mother.

He looks around the near-empty hall.  As always in such circumstances, he spots the knots of whisperers, and wonders what about him displeases them now.  Each group he’s approached has grown silent.

“Your grace.”

This is one of Lord Arryn’s creatures, the Lord of the Fingers – Baelish, that was it.  Lord Baelish.

“Your grace, might I discuss something with you in _private?_ ”

Stannis glances around.  Eyes emerge from the whispering clumps, and he grinds his teeth.

“Speak.”

Baelish shakes his head.  “Your grace, I bear ill news, not meet for… common ears.”

Stannis begrudgingly follows.

-

“Don’t speak to me.”

Robert holds up his hands.  “Stannis…”

Stannis doesn’t answer.  He doesn’t trust his own tongue.  He looks away from his brother, and stares instead at a patch of wall as though perhaps it will burst into flame. 

 “She came to me!  Threw herself at me!  You can’t honestly think – I’d never have let her marry you, not afterwards.  And anyway, better you know now than –“

“Than when?  Than when you’d fathered me your bastard as an heir?”

Robert reddens.  “Godsdammit, Stannis!  I’m trying to apologize.”

He cannot stay in this room.  He cannot stay in this castle.

_“Don’t speak to me.”_

-

Lord Arryn finds him.

He has retreated to Maekon’s chamber.  It’s the only place here, now, that feels anywhere close to safe.  He strokes Maekon’s nose as the beast crunches on the remnants of a sheep, and they both turn to glare at the Lord of the Eyrie in unison.

“Stannis.”

He does not remember granting Lord Arryn the right to address him by his first name.

“I’m marrying Selyse Florent.”  The words start to come more easily.  “You’ll have your precious alliance.  Lord Florent won’t flap off in disgrace.  And then I’ll go home, and my lord brother can bed any whore he chooses.”  _Is that good enough for you?_

Lord Arryn closes his eyes.  Maekon perks up at the shift in posture, pressing his weight from foot to foot.

“Well?” Stannis demands, eventually.

“You have my thanks.”

As though he wants them.  Lord Arryn is not his father.  Lord Arryn was a father to _Robert_ , and the whole court can see the results of that. 

And then it worsens.

“You mustn’t press your brother.”

“I mustn’t-“

Maekon tenses again beneath his hand at the force of Arryn’s gaze.  “You don’t understand the power you hold now.  House Baratheon cannot be seen to be in conflict –“

“Then tell that to _Robert._ ”

He cannot bear this anymore.  Not these red stone walls, not all the lying crowds, not bowing and scraping and _your grace your grace your grace._ He cannot, and yet he must.

“Go,” he says, finally.  “I fear our anger rouses my dragon.” 

-

He marries Selyse Florent.  They have scarcely a conversation once he has placed the cloak around her shoulders.  He can feel his face burning all throughout the feast, though with rage or shame he isn’t sure.  Every man at court knows about Robert and Delena, has known for weeks.  Selyse has likely known, he realizes suddenly, but even if he wished to talk to her, she’d never hear his voice over the din.

The Queen, beside Robert, is as still as stone.  She dances only with her brother.  Robert goes quickly from dancing to drinking, but more women surround him all the same.  He searches in vain for a face he knows, but Lord Estermont is ill again, Renly too young, and so he is surrounded by Florents and Reachmen.  Ser Davos is somewhere, down at the far end of the hall, but he might as well be in Yi Ti.

And then –“a bedding! A bedding!” – and a miserable eternity of laughing women, and, somehow, the boom of Robert’s chuckles above it all.  He slams the door as soon as they toss him through it.

His wife sits on the edge of the bed, her face crimson.

Robert would have something to say, would tell her she was beautiful or whatever nonsense he’d fed to her cousin.  But his hands shake as much as hers.

It is easier the second time, in the morning, when at least the positioning is less awkward.  She even kisses him, not on the mouth but on the cheek.  “Thank you.”

“For what?”  They’ve both done their duty.  Hopefully an heir will follow.

“For not saying I’d look better in the dark.”

She has the trace of a mustache on her upper lip, and her features are as awkward and squared-off as his own.  She came to him a maid – at least so far as he could tell – so he cannot imagine who might have told her this before.  Or are women as cruel to each other as men?

At any rate, he had left the lights on as a practical measure.  He has certainly earned none of the thanks he is receiving.

But perhaps there are some he can earn.

-

His lady wife stares at Maekon, who, as always under the attention, preens, fanning out his spikes.

She murmurs out a prayer, and then: “He’s beautiful.”

Stannis supposes the dragon is, at that.  “Don’t show fear.”

But he hardly needs to say it.  Her back is straight, and her eyes wide only with delight.  “May I touch him?”

“Wait.”  Stannis moves forward, taking the chain around Maekon’s neck and unlocking it from the wall.  “I’ll hold his head.”  He keeps up a soothing rub to the soft scales beneath the chin.  “Easy,” he says.  “Easy.”

Selyse steps forward, and Maekon grumbles low in his throat.

“No fear.”  He isn’t sure which of them he’s instructing.

Finally, his lady wife lays a hand on Maekon’s forehead.  The scales there are thick enough not to burn her, but she still withdraws from the heat after a moment, keeping each movement slow.

“Do you ride him yet?”

“Soon.”  Men at Dragonstone are working on a harness.

“I should like to see that.”  Her eyes are already somewhere far away, like a warrior planning for battle.  “Will our children ride?”

“I don’t know.”  Now it’s his eyes, perhaps, seeing a son named for his father, seeing some foolish fantasy.  He shakes himself back to reality.

-

Maekon paces the dragonpit, and sulks, but three sheep get him still enough for Stannis to fasten the harness on.  There is a fresh-blackened place on the new-blackened walls that he wills himself not to look at.

“A thief, most likely,” Othar had said.  He rebuilt the pit, and knows it as well as any man but Stannis.  Stannis trusts his words.  And no one from the castle is missing, nor anyone from the village save a fishingboat lost at sea.

He had waited for some change in Maekon, now that he’d more than likely tasted man.  Nothing seemed forthcoming.  The dragon was as he always was, and perhaps that was what sent foolish chills down Stannis’ back.

He’s still small enough that they can take him up on a long chain, and let him fly.  _Down,_ and _Up_ , and _Flame!_   Soon Stannis will fly with him.  The harness seems to still be one his back, even as Maekon twists and dives and tests the give of the chain.  It’s the strongest they have, and soon it won’t be enough.

Stannis blows sharply on a metal pipe, and Maekon turns.  Slowly, he descends, increasing his speed when he sees the cow laid out by the edge of the pit. 

“Flame!” calls Stannis, and Maekon roasts the cow as he comes in to land.  He crunches at it contently.

Stannis walks over to the dragon’s side, examining the harness.  It seems to have held up.  He runs one finger along a leather strap.  It’s smooth to his touch, not singed at all.  This one, finally, looks to hold up to a ride.

Then Maekon flinches with a growl.

Stannis barely sees the boy, walking where he shouldn’t.  He barely sees the jaws begin to open.  And he flings himself in front of the flame, and he sees only red, and light, and red.

-

He must have screamed.  His throat is dry as charcoal.  Pain fades in and out across his arm and shoulder – but it’s the wrong shoulder, isn’t it?  Something is holding him down.

Some things.

“…nor the good, the bad.”  Cressen has too many teeth, and his eyes are brown.  He holds a meat cleaver.  The walls around are Storm’s End, but Stannis sees his own hand, lying limp and bloody on the Painted Table. 

“Your grace… your grace…”  The words are drowned out by the storm.

He wakes, and dreams, and wakes again.

“Stannis.”  A woman.  Not his mother. Not a serving maid.  Selyse.

He tries to croak something, and finds that his jaw is tied.  Bandages.  Half his body seems to be bound with them.  He realizes his wife was holding his hand only when she pulls away.

“Cressen!” she calls, standing.  “Cressen – you, Seaworth, Waters.  Fetch the Maester!”

There’s movement at the door.  He can barely see it.  His neck has the bandages worse than his jaw, and only one eye is free.  His mind is muddled – dreamwine or sweetsleep – and it takes him a moment to realize why.  He might well have lost the other.  He might well –

He can feel his arm.  Or can he?  He is certain he’s clenching his left fist, but there’s no pull in the sheets, and something about it all feels off.

He grinds his jaw, pulling at the cloth and plaster.  Selyse comes towards him again, and sits.  He wonders who has sat vigil in that chair, for how long.  Cressen, of course.  He would not have believed it of his wife were she not there before him.

“How,” he manages.  Pain is everywhere, like the sound of the ocean, but now it stabs into his raw throat.  “How… bad?”  _My arm.  The boy.  My dragon.  What happened to them?  How long have I lain here useless?_

She squeezes his hand in both of hers, and he stares at the mesh of their fingers.  “We had to take your left arm to the elbow.”  We.  As though she’d been responsible.  “You may yet lose the eye.  That little fool you… I had him sent away.  He lives.”  She spits it.  Now her knuckles are white.  “They lured the _beast_ back to the pit with a cow.”

-

The _beast._

The words eat at him as Cressen comes, as the days pass, as he sits and stands and stares at the stump of his arm.  Twice a day, they take the bandages from his eye, to clean it and test what he can see. 

“How is it, your grace?”

There’s genuine interest in Davos Seaworth’s voice, and so Stannis forgives him what he might not another man.

“Light and shadow.” He grits his teeth, ignoring the twinge in his jaw.  The bad eye plays havoc with the good.  Even if rot doesn’t set in, he’ll likely need a patch.  _The beast._   It’s the truth, and he’d refused it until nearly too late.  _The beast,_ and he’d been treating it like a charming, willful child.  He looks away from Seaworth, and down.

The hook is a practical thing in black iron.  He has no objections to it.  It simply _is._

But it is not a hand.  He has objections to that, and to-

“Do you still feel them?”  Because he does, sometimes, the hand and fingers burning just outside his gaze.

Seaworth starts at the question, then raises his maimed hand in recognition.  Stannis remembers that hand, flat on the table, the tension in the wiry arm as Davos had tried not to jerk away.

“Not much to feel,” he finally says.  His eyes are warm.  “But yes.  Sometimes.”

-

There are still bandages over half his head and shoulder when he returns to the dragonpit.  Maekon clicks his jaws at him, as eager as a hound.  The heat soaks into him.

He must not flinch away.  He must not break his gaze.  The dragon still knows him, but that could all change in an instant.  If he becomes prey in the beast’s mind, then everything has been for naught.

Fire licks edges of the pit.  Maekon twists, stamping his feet in the chains.  Then his head lifts, very slowly.

The jaws are half open, barely a foot away.  _I must not break._

Maekon bumps his nose into Stannis’s cheek, once, twice.  Once, that had been a hatchling’s affection.  Now, he does not know what to think.  He remembers the stark black words in the books, and the stark black ash of the bodies.  They seem worlds apart.

“Hold,” he says.  The head lowers.  He remembers how to breathe.

He removes the chains as Maekon chews on the remnants of a cow.  The dragon is as calm around him as ever.  It seems it was only Stannis changed by the flames.

“Hold,” and “down,” and “flame.”  He exhausts four sheep and the limits of their caged repertoire.  Maekon stays in the pit, but his eyes are on the barely visible crack of sky.  Finally, he stretches his neck along the ground, and Stannis realizes he is waiting for the saddle.

He has a thousand reasons not to.  His skin crawls and cracks, and he clenches the hand he no longer has.  Maekon waits.

Above them, the flash of sky is very, very blue.

-

They leave the pit behind them in an instant.

The black wings beat, and the dragon calls, a long, unanswered note.  Stannis grips for his life with hook and hand.

He had dreamt of this, once, when he was a boy.  He’d remembered those dreams at times, unasked for, on a leaping horse or in the wind on his face at sea. 

A gale could scarcely have prepared him for _this_ wind, ripping the bandages from his face and screaming louder than the dragon.  Beneath him, the sea is a painted map, smooth and endless.  Dragonstone is a black gash vanishing behind him.

Maekon spirals, diving, and Stannis realizes belatedly that he ought to be exercising more control.  The lash is tied behind his leg, if he can just let go to reach-

But there’s nothing alive beneath them.  No ships.  No thieves or assassins or stable boys. 

He cannot let down his guard.  He’s _learned_ that lesson.  It’s seared into his very flesh.  But now, at this moment, he feels none of it. 

He’s flying.  And he’s smiling.

And he’s _free._

-

It is three months later, to the day, that Balon Greyjoy crowns himself, and war begins anew.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional, spoiler-involving trigger warnings posted in the endnote (along with a small, even more spoiler-involving secondary note about the characters involved).

They skim low towards the fleet.  Maekon is bleeding – barely – from a scorpion bolt, and the scratch of pain has made him wild.

“Flame,” Stannis yells against the wind, and the sails of the longship go up in smoke.  The screams and the heat blur together as the dragon twists around for another pass.

He snatches a man in his jaws, and Stannis brings the whip down hard against his neck.  Half of the corpse hits the sea, and Maekon reluctantly spirals back upwards, his jaws crunching.

-

_With child._

He remembers Selyse’s eyes, bright with pride.  She’d pulled his hand to her still-flat belly.

“Two months, Cressen says.”

He’d not had words.  Thanking her seemed foolish, and his sudden urge to babble out names more foolish still. 

“My lord husband –“ and he’d started at the strange, lilting tone to her voice, at the gleam in her eyes “- you’re smiling.”

Two months.  Going on six months, now.  He’d left her on Dragonstone, her head high and her back stiff.  She hadn’t wept. 

Dragonstone is no place to birth a child.  He thinks of the old Queen, a storm, a bed of blood.   He could return to a son, or he could return to a corpse.  Each thought tears at him.

-

From above, he can see the fleets, like toy ships on the Painted Table.  The royal galleys have held formation well, but now the boarding actions are beginning, leaving the sea below a confused tangle of spray and oars.

This is the point where disaster might strike.  Maekon pulls at the harness now, barely noticing the whip as he dives downwards.  He’s learned that ships are prey, and he cares no more for “friend” and “foe” than a wolf might for the king’s game laws.  Stannis can picture all too easily the _Fury_ going up in flames.

He kicks Maekon towards the longships at the rear of the battle, but two more passes leave a long bleeding gash along one wing.  Maekon, with a roar, plunges towards the thick of the fight.  By sheer luck only, the sails he snags are Ironborn.

“Up!”

The wings beat furiously.  Hot blood hits Stannis’ face, but Maekon rises.

Stannis cranes his neck for a view of the beating wings.  The wound is near the bone, where the membrane is thickest.  It doesn’t seem to be ripped through, at least, but their angle of ascent is awkward.  They’ll need to land soon.

_Godsgrief_ had been converted into a dragonship of sorts, with a strong keel and a wide deck where Maekon had slept on the voyage.  Stannis can no more spot it now from the air than he could with his patch on the wrong eye. 

And he cannot let the fleet think their dragon defeated.

-

It had been a fight simply to bring the dragon with the fleet.

Robert had wanted him for the assault on Pyke itself.  The war preparation had brought the king into Small Council meetings for the first time in years.

_To Pyke then of, course._

Stannis had told him no.

_Think of it, finally fighting together as brothers._

As if that mattered, in the face of winning a war.

_Then I order you –_

It hadn’t been strategy by then, had it?  It had been Robert’s damnable inability to be told no.  Maekon had no business in a pitched battle of men.  It had been work enough training him for ships.  He’d do nothing more on Pyke than roast both armies into ash.

-

They dive back towards the fight.  Stannis can’t tell Maekon’s bellow from the roaring wind, and he doesn’t dare call for flame.  Smoke tears at his eye as they level out, spare feet above a crowd of masts.  As it clears, he spots the gleam of _Fury_ ’s gilded stag.

And just past it –

“Down!”

The sea heaves, and the dragon twists, and Maekon hits the black longship’s deck with a crunch of wood and men.  She buckles in the water, the force of it pulling her away from her grapple with _Fury._   Maekon’s flame comes unbidden, and he pulls his wings tight to his body as a swarm of men descend.

The Ironborn are no cowards, he’ll give them that.

Stannis has only the lash, and leather armor.  Maekon shrugs off swordblows, and rakes the deck with further flame, but a shadow looms from Stannis’ blind side, and he has barely a moment to react as a man leaps for him.

The blow glances, and the attacker falls away as Maekon twists, but now Stannis’ hook is lodged in the harness, and the next man has more balance and a knife.  The blade is aimed for his neck and takes his shoulder. 

He strikes out with the handle of the lash, at one man and then another.  The ship is listing badly now, with a great crack in her deck and the haze of fire all around. 

Maekon screams.

Stannis feels something grab at his back, but Maekon is already beating into the air, splintering the mainmast with a sweep of his tail.  He’s suddenly grateful for the lodged hook as the dragon whirls.

For an instant, on the deck, Stannis sees a reaver in armor.  Black with blood, and then bright with flame.

The dragon calls, triumphant.

-

Maekon sleeps, curled on _Godsgrief’s_ deck. 

The crew had brought him roasted beef, which he didn’t much need with a belly full of reavers, and a barrel of ale, which had thankfully been returned below at the sight of Stannis’ glare.  He doesn’t want to contemplate a drunken dragon.  A wounded one was uncontrollable enough.

The scratch on his flank from the scorpion bolt is already nearly invisible, though Maekon shifts with a grumble when Stannis runs his hand along it.  The wound in his wing is as he had thought in the air: not a rip, and unlikely to cause permanent damage.  He’ll go over the dragon scrolls he brought again tonight, for what help they’ll offer. 

The only other wound he finds is a swelling towards the end of the tail.  It might have come from breaking the mast, or from the Ironborn captain – Victarion Greyjoy, he must have been, in armor on the flagship.

“A good day’s work, dragon.”

Maekon rumbles in his sleep again. 

Stannis will stay with him, as he generally does aboard ship.  He can still hear the roars and cheers of the fleet, and the songs of the men below drinking Maekon’s erstwhile ale.  Captain after captain, lords and sailors both, have come aboard _Godsgrief_ to cheer the victory, give casualty reports, or simply to stare at the dragon.

His name.  They’re cheering his name.  Is this how it feels to be Robert?  Will he wake up in the morning with an urge for drink and whores?

The thought makes him smile, softly, to himself.  He leans back against Maekon, and stares up at the sky.

-

 

The skies above Pyke are calm and clear.  Maekon remembers his injuries as they crest over a hill of sheep, and Stannis lets him land.  The dragon has done his duty well enough. 

Flame takes two sheep as they come in to land, and the rest scatter bleating across the rocks.  There’s a hovel past the ridge of the hill, a shadow vanishing inside it as he stares.  In other circumstances, he’d leave a few coin in the field, but today Maekon’s sheep are spoils of war. He keeps a wary eye on the house, but there’s no further movement.

Maekon finishes his meal, and begins to clean his claws.  It can be a long process, and Stannis is tempted to let the dragon preen at his leisure.  Time here is time not spent with the king.

But those are the thoughts of a coward.

He slings himself up over the dragon’s neck.  Maekon makes a small, displeased noise at the interruption, but rises into the air at Stannis’ call.

-

Over the harbor, Stannis can see the vanguard of the fleet sailing in.  His landing is greeted by yells, men shouting and pushing to get a better look at the dragon.  Maekon, equally interested, swings himself around, and Stannis nearly stumbles in the dismount.

“Your grace!” “My prince!” “Your grace!”

To his relief, one of the shouters is one of his own.  Ser Richard Horpe keeps a wary eye on the direction of Maekon’s own gaze.

“Chains,” says Stannis.  _And a strong wall.  And guards._

Horpe has three Dragonstone men, and a few others who don’t seem complete fools.  They find a clear space between old walls and a crumbled building, and get to the work of securing a dragon.  Bits and pieces of the crowd follow them.  Stannis leaves enough give in the chains that Maekon can fight if attacked.

Stannis gives Maekon a final pat on the nose, a foolish habit he has yet to break, even now that the space between the beast’s nostrils could easily fit two of his hands.

“The battle?”  The report to the fleet had been little more than the word “victory.”

“Most of their organized strength was at sea.  It’s been hand to hand work, and bloody.  We lost young Wylde storming the cliff.”  He shakes his head.

Stannis leaves two men as guards – they can shout back at the crowd, if nothing else – and continues up the cliffside.  He can see the royal banner flapping from what must be the Greyjoy keep.  Horpe continues to detail the battle, and then pauses.

“One man said we had Greyjoy alive, and then…”   A swallow.

“And?”

“Another said we had him dead, another that he escaped.  Three more that King Robert slew him in the thick of battle.  I don’t know the truth of it, your grace.  Two of his sons are dead, at the least.”

“And his brother.”

They walk on.  Men fall in behind them, though Stannis knows them only by their banners.  He’ll have more like young Wylde after this, more than likely.  Maekon had barely hatched before hedge knights and lord’s sons began crowding his island.  His one letter from Selyse had contained reports of _three_ proposed betrothals for a son yet unborn.

They come through the rubble of a gate.  Ahead of them, a man strums on a lute – Robert brought _singers_ with his army?

Stannis has never had an ear for music.  He notes, with annoyance, that the song becomes louder as he approaches.  It takes him several steps to grasp why.

_Oh, harken to the tale I’ve told… About a dragon, black and gold…_

Behind him, Horpe is mercifully silent.

-

“Your grace…”

“No.  They’ll have little Lord Theon in King’s Landing.  And if they don’t like it, I’ll bloody well give them Stannis!”

Robert is still laughing as Stannis approaches.  Lord Stark is not, if he ever was; he gives a rough bow in greeting as Stannis takes a knee.

“Stannis!”  It’s been at least a day, but Robert still wears the flush of battle.  Everything about him is louder and brighter, the drunkard in King’s Landing banished.

“Your grace.”  Robert waves a hand, and Stannis stands.  He begins a summary of the fleet action, the battle won and the ships lost.  Robert nods at all the appropriate places, but his gaze wanders.

Eventually, he waves his hand again.  “Enough, enough!  Save it for the Master of Coin.”  A booming laugh.  “You killed yourself a squid, brother!”  Stannis braces for a thump to the back that never comes.  “I killed _his_ brother not a dozen feet from here, trying a last stand in his keep!”

Lord Stark’s jaw tightens, but he says nothing.

“And we didn’t need your bloody beast at all!”

Stannis says nothing.

“Though I see you weren’t such a coward as to keep him out of _your_ fight.”  All the laughter is gone.

Stannis gropes for solid ground.  “That was something he was trained for, in a battle _I_ commanded-”

The hall goes silent.  Robert, when he speaks, is quiet too.  “ _You_ commanded, brother?”

They were the wrong words.  They were the wrong words, but they were the truth.  Stannis meets the king’s glare.

“I command, _Stannis._   I command you, and I command your beast.  I didn’t kill the bloody dragons so that one could make you _king!”_

Gasps and stares.  Surely the hall was not this full a moment ago.

Stannis bows his head, hating every inch of the motion.  His hands shake.  _I am no traitor._ He stifles the words.  _I am no king._

“Get out of my sight.”  There’s no apology in Robert’s words, no regret for the outburst.  They’ve crossed a bridge, Stannis suddenly knows.  Years of arguments and a few ill chosen words, and now there may be no going back.

He squares his shoulders, and walks away.

Lord Stark tries to follow him.  A raised hand and an open mouth, poised for some words of comfort he likely learned from Jon Arryn.  Stannis cannot think of anything he wants less in the universe than to be lectured by Robert’s chosen brother.  The Ironborn pale in comparison.

“Prince Stannis –“

“I am needed elsewhere.”  He shoves past the Lord of Winterfell.

He doesn’t stop walking, outpacing Horpe, leaving singers and brothers and stares behind him.

-

Night is falling by the time he finally returns to Maekon.

The dragon is asleep.  An eye slits open at Stannis’ approach, but closes again upon seeing that he is neither an enemy nor a meal. 

There is a dark figure by the gap in one wall, just out of the dragon’s reach.  Stannis reaches for his sword before he recognizes the shape.

“Your grace.”  The days of feeding scraps to the hatchling are long gone, but Davos Seaworth still seems even more drawn to the dragon than the rest of Westeros.

“Ser.”  He ought to order the man out.  Instead, words fly to his lips without conscious thought.  “What would you do if I crowned myself?”

Silence.  He takes a step forward.  In the fading light, he can just see the crease in Seaworth’s brow.

“Would you follow me?  If I took my dragon on King’s Landing, as half the realm says I’ll do?  If I were the traitor my brother thinks I am?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”  He spits it, suddenly enraged, and behind him Maekon stirs.  Seaworth holds his ground.

“Yes.”  It’s defiance more than flattery.  “I’d hold my oath, your grace.  I’d take no man with me.  I’d counsel you against it if you asked.”

_Whether or not you asked_ goes unspoken.

“I’d send my sons away, so they’d not die with me.  But yes.  I’d hold my oath.”

It’s not the answer he wants.  He spoke, like a fool, seeking _reassurance,_ seeking- seeking what?  Would he have preferred to hear a no?  That a man who followed him before he ever hatched a dragon would choose Robert?

“You speak treason so easily, Onion Knight.”

And treason seems _real_ now, hanging in the air more clearly than it ever did when the king had broached it.  Not just fools would follow him.  He could, with a single word, drag good men to their deaths.

“You’ve offered me no treason.”

He can barely see the clear gaze in the darkness.  He wonders, not for the first time, what drove this man to follow him.  How what Robert can earn with a glance, he can only find with at the edge of a knife.

-

The voyage home is long and rough.  A gale scatters the fleet off Lannisport, and for weeks _Godsgrief_ tacks slowly against contrary winds.  Stannis would take Maekon overland, but it feels like a dereliction of his duty.  He will give Robert no further cause for complaint.

He takes Maekon towards home, finally, as they reach the mouth of the Blackwater.  For weeks they’ve flown only to fish, Maekon growing irritable and sluggish.  The black dot on the horizon brings him back to life.

_Home,_ Stannis thinks, as Maekon spirals in the air.

_My home._

-

“A daughter.”  Selyse’s voice is defiant.  She clenches a hand tightly on the babe’s cradle.  “Shireen.”

His daughter is very small.  Her head could fit in his hand, were he to reach out and risk waking her.  All he can remember of newborn Renly is the noise.

Her hair is black. 

“What color are her eyes?”  A preposterous question.  Even Selyse starts back.

“Blue,” she says, softly.  “Cressen says the color will likely stay.”  Her hand comes off the cradle, to rest on his arm, and he stares back and forth between his wife and daughter.

Daughter.  He has a daughter.  He has a child.

She will never ride Maekon, never rule Dragonstone.  She, too, will watch her brothers do all that she cannot. 

“Shireen,” he repeats.  And then: “Tell me, wife, have the betrothal offers changed at all?”

-

“What is it?”

He dislikes being interrupted in his work.  He was two scrolls deep into naval requisitions when the knock came at his door.

“Begging your pardon, your grace.”  The boy swallows.  “But they’ve found more from the pirates at the water gate.”

Taking Maekon out to hunt pirates has raised a surprising number of objections.  Most of these have been from supposedly law-abiding lords and merchants; a few, more direct, have been from the pirates themselves.  Three of his men at arms have been killed on Dragonstone- unforgivable - an envoy of two knights were attacked in King’s Landing, and three weeks ago a man had attempted to bludgeon Ser Davos in a tavern before being wrestled down by his oldest son.

He follows the squire down to the lowest of the gates beneath the keep.  Two men are standing guard; a third emerges from behind the portcullis, ashen-faced.

“What –“

“Stay back!”  The squire jumps at the cry, but Stannis remains unmoved.

“ _What has happened?”_

“Stay back!  Stay back and fetch a Maester –“

There’s a body, lying half covered in the water, swollen and unrecognizable. 

“A Maester will do him little good, I think.”

The man finally comes to his senses.  “Your grace.”  He shakes his head, pulling away from the grasp of one of the guards.  “Your grace, look at his neck.”

The water laps at skin half-turned to stone.

-

They find two more greyscale corpses, one in a public well.  Pieces of a fourth are stowed among Maekon’s evening meal – proof, as if he needed more, that there is nowhere on the island safe from traitors.

Organized traitors.  Trained traitors.  Men he’d thought reliable shy away from even burning the bodies, let alone slicing them to dragon food or dumping them down wells.  One body had been in the water for days, another can’t have been left for more than a few hours.  And where had they _found_ four men all dead of greyscale?  _Men have expended less effort to kill kings._

Stannis orders the harbor closed, the castle searched, the townsfolk to their homes.  It’s too late already.  Within hours, half the island seems convinced they’ve caught the plague.  In a day, they’ve found the first true victims.

Selyse clutches Shireen.

“I’ve dismissed four of the serving maids, and I won’t have her near the guards.”  Her jaw is clenched.

“Good.”  Stannis nods, sharply.  His daughter will be safe.  He will not allow himself to dwell on the alternative.  That fear has been his wife’s one concession to weakness in the turmoil – still better than most of the men he has at the moment.

The pirates have stretched them thin.  He has men in King’s Landing, in White Harbor.  Horpe is sailing to the Sisters, and Norcross is in Lys.  Ser Davos is at his keep on Cape Wrath.  The best he has now is the Massey boy, clever enough, but barely a knight and too young for even that.

“Two more have taken ill, your Grace.”  Two more in five hours, and that’s only the ones showing scales.

It’s a siege, then.  Dragonstone locked down, never mind the squalling of fools.  He will not let the greyscale spread to King’s Landing.

He sends a letter to the court, with instructions to kill and burn the raven carrying it.

-

“The dragonfire –“

“Get him out of my sight.”

The first to trespass in the dragonpit seemed to think Maekon could cure them.  The last few haven’t seemed to care if they’re cured or burned.

He takes Maekon up.  It’s the only rest he will allow himself.  They patrol for ships – escapees, smugglers, assassins.  Seven ships left the harbor between when the first corpse was left, and when the first corpse was found.  _Winter Rose, Allanan, Sweetwater, Nymeria …_ He repeats the names, again and again, until the world is nothing but syllables and wingbeats.

He must not think of his daughter.

He must not think of Selyse, whitefaced, all her caution good for naught.  Of the _pity_ on every foolish face.

He must understand that his daughter is dead. For all it may be weeks, yet, until she stops breathing, she is dead.  He will not let himself be crippled by hope.

(“They’ve passed the worst of it,” he’d told Robert, on that tower in the storm, and willed the lie to be the truth.  Willed it as the _Windproud_ faltered, willed it as he clutched his brother’s hand.)

The only wakes on the water beneath them are a porpoise pod, which Maekon swoops down on in delight.  Stannis lets him fall and feast, barely shifting his hand on the reins.

Shireen could string words together, now, into nonsense sentences.  Her nurse (her nurse has been dead for weeks) had never seen a babe speak so early. 

Maekon rises, catching an updraft as they circle back to the island.  His wingbeats are slow and soothing.  Stannis cannot remember the last time he slept.

He tries to push his mind to useful things.  He’d knighted – he’d knighted two men, now, for keeping their heads in the crisis.  Waters and Morrigen – Blackwaters, now, he’d chosen– and Clayton had earned one, for all he’d been born lower than Ser Davos.  The names begin to fog together.

It takes him a moment to realize that Maekon has landed, perched on a stone dragon’s head.  It takes him a moment more to realize _where._

He jerks back.  The motion has no effect at all on the dragon, who keeps his nose pressed to an open window.

His daughter sleeps inside.

“Back!”  Now he goes for the whip.  Maekon twists his head to look at him.  “Back!”

They fall towards the dragon pit, Maekon diving steeply and landing roughly in annoyance.  He keeps his gaze trained on Stannis as he dismounts, and a scaled nose bumps his back, twice, as he ascends the ladder.

Stannis is sore, and tired.  Every scar on his body aches.  He sits at the top of the ladder, feet dangling like a child, and watches Maekon drift to sleep.

-

All the people say it was the dragon.

Not chance, not fate, not the strange resilience of babes.  Not Cressen, who’d nursed Shireen at risk of his own life.  Not even Selyse, on her knees in the sept without sleep.

It was the dragon, who had breathed on the child, who had marked her.  Servants, coming back to the palace, whisper that she never had greyscale at all, that she was born the dragon’s daughter. 

“A heavy burden, to lay upon a child.”  Selyse shakes her head, but there’s a wild joy in her that Stannis has never seen.

“A story for fools.”  Stannis tightens his arms, as if he can protect his daughter from every lack-brained bard on Dragonstone.  Her eyes open, at the motion, but she blinks and returns to sleep.

They say it was the dragon, too, who ended the plague, though folk are at least as willing to ascribe that honor to his rider.  Not for the planning, not for the blockade.  No, as far as Stannis can tell, he is meant to have ridden the streets laying his burning gaze on the dying.  Men shout his name.

It is a strange thing, to be loved.  Stannis looks down at his daughter.  A strange thing, indeed.

-

A year passes.

His daughter grows, walks, laughs.  She has a name for each of the stone dragons that guard her window.

Selyse throws feasts, wears jewels, and spins him out among the dancers, where each time he treads on her toes sends her laughing.

“I’ve never known you to indulge in wine.”

“Not a sip,” she says, close into his ear.  “Not a single sip, for I’m with child.”

He smiles, too, at that, and every eye goggles at them, the Prince and his Lady, as hard and as cold as their island, smiling and twirling and very nearly tripping over one another.

He returns to court, as he has been dreading for months, and resumes the drudgery of naval budgets, tax increases, and well-meaning talks from Lord Arryn.  Shireen is left, in the care of Cressen and the new nurse, as “acting Lady of Dragonstone.”  Seaworth watches the harbor, Florent the keep.

Selyse flies to King’s Landing on dragonback.

Maekon paced, and growled, allowing Stannis to pull his wife aboard only once the beast was certain it was Stannis who would be doing the true _riding._   Even so, he sulks in the Red Keep dragontower, grumbling to himself and cleaning his claws.  They’ve had to order in extra cows.

“ _Stannis,_ ” she says, and she’s never looked at him like that, never looked like that at anything save their daughter newly healed.  “ _Thank you.”_

“It is your due,” he says.  “You are a dragonrider’s wife.”  The words suddenly sound preposterous and poetic.

But they make her smile.  “I carry a dragonrider.” Her hands are on her belly, barely beginning to swell.  “And he’ll know that.  He’ll know that all his life.”

Heavy burdens, then, for both their children.

Robert throws a banquet, the walls swallowed up in cloth-of-gold and the air a miasma of spices and wine.  The Queen gifts Selyse a ruby necklace with her own hands.  (“With her own hands!”  That will be repeated, as though it is some great labor for his brother’s wife to distribute necklaces.)

As nine months wind down, he vows not to miss a second child’s birth.  If his wife faces death, he’ll stand by her. 

Steffon, Orys, Ormund.  Cassana, if a girl.  He’s given far more thought to naming this child than he ever needed to for Maekon.

“Not another dragon name, I hope!”  When the subject had, terribly, been raised in front of Robert.  “I won’t have another damned Aegon in my bloodline!”

“The first Prince Joffrey was son to the Half-Year Queen.”  Stannis aimed it hard, and felt it strike. Another conversation over.  Another glare from Lord Arryn.  He wants to be gone from this place.

The first word from Dragonstone comes in the middle of a Council meeting.  Stannis learns that his wife is in labor at the same time that he learns the Beggar King is dead.

“And they’re sure of it?”  Robert cracks the table with the force of his blow.

“The fire spread to most of Pentos, your grace. There has been no report of him since.”  Varys is more impenetrable than ever, deep in a hooded cloak.

“Oh, a fire, a fire.”  Bleary eyes roll.

For once, Stannis is in agreement with his king.  The wretched boy had spent his life escaping from one noose after another.  “Less than a month without a sighting is no proof of death, eunuch.”

Petyr Baelish of the Fingers, who for some unfathomable reason is the newly-made Master of Coin, speaks up in agreement.  Stannis can hear the clank of armor as Ser Barristan shifts from foot to foot.  Then, worst of all, Lord Arryn’s hand lands on his arm.

“I know you worry, but there’s no aid you can give her.  She’s as well without you until the babe is born.”

“Arryn!”  Robert’s bark, mercifully, takes the hand away.

But what is true for Lysa Arryn is not true for Selyse.  His wife had seen him at his weakest.  She had sat by him for days, as he lay a mass of burns.  It is nothing less than his duty to do the same for her.

“If I may continue?”  Varys’ voice.  He hates it.  He hates this room, and these people, and he hates the Beggar King, for his last revenge of dying _now._

“A city fire is survivable, easily.  But I have lately learned the _cause_ of that fire.  The principle explosion, reported by multiple witnesses and one of Prince Stannis’ own captains, was no accident.  It was wildfyre.  Wildfyre, which was meant to hatch a dragon.”

Stannis grinds his teeth.

The babble in the room floats around him.  There are dragons in Pentos.  There are no dragons in Pentos.  Daenerys Targaryen is alive, or she is dead.  Lord Baelish is asking him how Maekon hatched, just to hear him confess he doesn’t know.

And then a boy, panting, eyes wide.  Allard Seaworth, the only squire on Dragonstone bold enough to interrupt the Small Council.  Stannis notes this fact only distantly.  His chest turns to ice.

“Your grace – your grace.  Maestar Cressen sent – you’re needed on Dragonstone.  You’re needed now.”

-

Selyse does not weep.  Somehow, that is the worst of it.  Her eyes are red, her face is gaunt, and her shoulder as stiff as the hand he places upon it.  She stares at the walls of her chamber with eyes he might have turned once upon storm-wracked Shipbreaker Bay.

“I’m sorry, my lord.”  Not Stannis.  Not even ‘my lord husband.’  He doesn’t know how he earned her use of his name, any more than he knows how to go about requesting its return.

“You have done nothing.”  The words hang.  “Nothing wrong,” he amends, tripping over his tongue.

“Then _why?”_   She pulls away from his hand.

“Maester Cressen says the grayscale lingered.”

His son had been born dead.  His son had been born scaled, and hard as stone.  One maid had whispered of a dragon child, and he’d ordered her off of his island.

“The grayscale.”  She snorts the words.  “Then why did it not take _me_?”

-

He takes Maekon up, for hours on end.  It is the only thing with a chance to clear his head.  Servants have begun to avoid him.  His lady wife has, as well, although perhaps the truth is that he is avoiding her. 

_There’s no aid you can give her._ A pox on Lord Arryn, for being more right than he knew.

“Prince Stannis.”  He nearly runs into Cressen on the stairs.

“Maester?”  Cressen’s getting old – more than getting, has been old for years now.  He has no business running up and down stairs.

“Annis, the herbswoman,” Cressen says.  Stannis has heard of no such creature.  “She supplies me with a number of medicinal ingredients.”

Stannis waits.  Cressen, at least, would not look so worried over something of no importance.

“No one has seen her in some days.  One of the guardsmen says her house was abandoned.”

“The storm waves have taken a toll.”  A sunken fishing boat, children washed off docks.  Some old woman, combing the black sand, would have drowned without a cry.

“Perhaps.”

Stannis looks him in the eyes.

“There’s talk of curses.”  Cressen shakes his head.  “That a curse brought the greyscale, or…”  He closes his eyes.  “Dragonstone has lost much.  I fear many want someone to blame.”

-

He sees the fire from the sky.  By the time he’s landed, Maekon awkwardly perched on and around a stone wall, the house has fallen in. 

_It hasn’t spread, at least._

Men have gathered.  Some of his guard, the men in black cloaks who are _beginning_ to become a respectable lawkeeping unit, have organized a bucket chain, but the neighbors seem uninclined to assist.

“What happened here?”

Men stare.  Children whisper.  Finally, a broad-shouldered man pushes through the crowd.

“Don’t rightly know, your grace.”  Ser Clayton Suggs.  The arrival of another authority figure provokes more whispering, but no one else steps forward. 

It might have been an accident.  _Might._   But two more women have vanished, one a nurse in the keep, and Stannis won’t stand for more traitors among his people.

Stannis shifts in the saddle as Maekon eyes the crowd. “Suggs.  Take charge of this.”

“Aye, your grace.”  The knight turns to bellow orders at the crowd, and Stannis pats Maekon’s neck.

“Up-“

“No!”

Maekon chuffs out a ring of smoke as Stannis pulls back.

“I want to speak to our prince!  Let me speak to our prince!”

It’s a boy, his face grimed with ash.  He’s clawing his way past Suggs’ grip.

“She was a maggy, she was!  We were doing what – “ 

Suggs cuffs him.  Stannis feels his good fist clench with an urge to do the same.

“Take him to the keep,” he grits out, and flies away.

-

“A curse?  Then they ought to burn _this.”_ Selyse flings a flash of gold across the room.  Rubies glint in the light of the hearth.

She had worn the gift from the Queen every day since she’d been granted it. 

“Her own son will never ride a dragon.  Perhaps she couldn’t bear to see mine –“  She moves her hand again, as though she’s forgotten she’s already thrown the necklace.  “They’ll say that next, you know.  I hope they do.  I hope she _drowns_ in whispers.  I hope they –“

She has not cried.  Weeks, and she has not cried.  Stannis had seen that as strength.

He reaches out his hand, useless, as her tears begin to fall.

“ _Go,”_ she says, and it hitches and sobs.  “ _Go.”_

How much has he been robbed of?  A son dead before he lived, a wife who will not look at him, a daughter he has not seen in days.  He wishes, suddenly, that it _had_ been a curse.  Blood magic, punishment, the will of the gods.  He wishes, desperately, that there was something he could blame.

But there is nothing.  And so he walks away.

-

They find the next still screaming.

Stannis pushes his way, sword first, through a chain of hovels so old they’re half caverns.  The smoke is blinding.

The bonfire is in a tiny seacave, hidden behind a collapsed wall.  There would have been no way to spot it from the air.  He’ll knight the man leading the blackcloaks, for having the sense to follow the mob.

The rest of them have followed the screams.

Men fling buckets of seawater on the writhing figure, but it’s too late.  What’s visible of her now is barely human enough to wail.  Steam blends with the smoke, gleaming on his sword.

He plunges his sword into the haze, and draws it across the woman’s throat.

Blood hisses.  A man vomits.  The world swims, and Stannis loses himself in a moment of weakness, remembering black flame and Maekon’s teeth.

If she had done it – if someone had cursed him, killed his son – they would have died by inches.  They would have _longed_ for the mercy of the flame. 

“Your grace.”

Stannis blinks, his eye returning to focus.  Ser Davos has taken his arm.

“Your grace,” he repeats, and nods to the left.

Squirming between two blackcloaks, a third dead on the ground before him, is Ser Clayton Suggs.

-

“An’ he liked to watch ‘em, he did.”

Stannis grinds his teeth.  The way these folk would have it, Suggs drove along the entire mob at swordpoint, a lone murderer accompanied by twice a dozen innocent bystanders.  He’s had fifteen hung, regardless, and it’s only made the rest more eager to save their skins.

The boy he had sent to the dungeons is dead.  Suggs had caved in his skull while Stannis sat above them, blind.  No more.

He speaks to each of the prisoners.  Listens to them lie, listens to them beg. 

He’d knighted Suggs with his own hands.  Now, as he leaves the cells, he watches each man in armor, wondering which of them he’s a fool to trust.  He watches his wife and daughter, and fights for words he cannot find.

With Suggs, at least, the words come easy.

“I sentence you to death.”

-

Maekon is tense below him.  He has a sixth sense for knowing prey.  Stannis watches Suggs squirm under the golden gaze.

He dislikes the _pageantry_ of it all.  Curse this island.  Curse the demons it raises in men.

“I did it for you, my lord!  Justice, for you!”  Why is the man not gagged?

“You thought to do justice in my name.”  The words come from somewhere deep inside him, from some man with a golden crown.  The crowd stirs, as though it is someone else speaking.  “You thought to do _justice.”_   _You are not my Gregor Clegane, to do the things I cannot._

Maekon unfurls his wings.  For once, the fringes of the crowd don’t scatter.

 “I am Lord of Dragonstone.  I do justice here.”

The dragon rises.

“ _Flame_.”  He must have said the word, but he cannot hear it.  The light comes, and Stannis blinks until his vision returns.

And then the crowd roils around a lump of wood and ash.  In a moment, they have swallowed it.

_Stannis,_ they are chanting.  _The dragon, the dragon._

And from the edges, he hears it, just enough to make his blood run cold.

_The dragon king!_

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning:  
> Miscarriage/loss of a child.
> 
> Note:  
> Said child is not Shireen.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the third of four chapters, now, because it ballooned on me. Considering I originally meant to finish this thing in two weeks during Stannis Month last November, I really shouldn't have been surprised.
> 
> (I've also increased the rating, just in case; there's more graphic violence in this chapter and the one to follow than previous)

Shireen’s hands grip the harness in front of him.  He keeps his arms locked around her, but the flight so far has been calm, and Maekon steady. 

It would be foolish to say that the dragon seems fond of his daughter.  Maekon is fond of little more than food and admiration.  But he’s paid no heed to the extra presence on his back (certainly none of the sulking that accompanies rare flights with Selyse).  Perhaps he sees Shireen as some extension of Stannis – or, as some fools would have it, an extension of himself. 

It bodes well for the future.  It is _no_ excuse to let down his guard.

His daughter was six on her last nameday.  It had been a quiet affair, a family day, nothing like the feast that now brings them to King’s Landing.  Robert is celebrating his second son more now than he did at the boy’s birth. 

“You will not let them be betrothed,” Selyse had told him, her mouth grim.  “Not to that woman’s son, no matter what they offer.  You will not.” No order.  A statement of fact. “She has no need of a crown.  She’ll have a _dragon.”_

Tommen will offer no crown, and Robert will never offer Joffrey.  His wife’s logic had been otherwise infallible.  He will not sell his bloodline to Tywin Lannister, and he will not set Robert’s sons up for civil war.

Shireen doesn’t fidget as his arms tense.  She keeps her seat as Maekon twists in a crosswind.  He can’t speak to her above the roaring of the wind, but he pats her right hand, awkwardly, with his own.  She turns her head, eyes watering but bright.  He knows her smile.  He remembers it.

_She’ll have a dragon._

-

All peace ends.  Robert has declared the open tower unsuitable for Maekon, too prone to collapse.  He’s ordered it expanded, either uncaring or, worse, _quite aware_ that the work will take years.  Instead, Stannis guides the dragon down into a walled garden.

Shireen hops off with enthusiasm, staring around at the flowers that no one bothered to remove.  She might as well enjoy them now; they’ll be charred twigs by evening. 

“What are these called, father?”

He gives them a brief glance.  “I don’t know.”  There have been chains installed, at least, good thick ones.  There’s no roof, and Maekon is always harder to control when he can see the sky.  Stannis tests the heft of the iron in his hands.

Too short.

He can attach one leg, and the neckring.  If he were to use the other, Maekon would barely even be able to shift his weight.  A few hours of that, and he’d roast the next moving thing he saw, Stannis or no.

“Father?”

“I’ll have to try for the tail.”  Shireen nods.

The legring fits awkwardly around Maekon’s tail, kept from sliding off only by the spines on either side.  The scar from the Greyjoy Rebellion is still evident a few feet away.

Maekon turns, and snaps his teeth.  Shireen flinches.

“He wants food,” Stannis tells her, and her spine straightens again.  Stepping around Maekon’s head, he walks towards the gate.  “Guard!”

Nothing.

He sticks out his head, and spots one of Robert’s squires across the courtyard, as golden-headed as the queen.  “You!  Boy!”

“…Your grace?”  As though he hadn’t seen the dragon fly in.

“I need meat!  A side of beef, raw, or as much in mutton.”  The boy scurries off.

“It’s alright,” he hears from behind him.  “My lord father always brings you your dinner.”

“Shireen!”

She’s petting Maekon’s nose, or at least as well as she can reach.  His teeth are longer than her hands, and that fact has never seemed clearer to Stannis than at this moment.

He moves to stand beside her, and she lowers her hand.  He puts his own on Maekon’s neck, moving it in small unconscious rubs.

-

The meat takes too long to arrive, and when it does, Maekon swallows the trifling amount of mutton in two gulps.  He barely bothers to roast it first, and still leaves Stannis choking on smoke.  Short of a death, he scarcely thinks the day can worsen – and then he spots the man who Robert has apparently sent to greet him.

“Brother!”  Renly’s smile is as bright and false as any Cersei has ever given him.

“Renly.”  Stannis grinds his teeth.

“Your grace.”  Shireen curtsies neatly.

“None of that!”  The laugh sets the back of Stannis’ neck on edge.  Renly had been named a Prince at the same time that he had, a remarkably egalitarian gesture from Robert that had likely been Lord Arryn’s idea.  Stannis has certainly never heard him object to the title before. 

Renly, by himself, would not be so terrible.  He remains Stannis’ favorite brother, a part of him still the child at Storm’s End for all he hides it. It is what’s lurking in his shadow that Stannis cannot bear.

“And this is your cousin Edric!”

Shireen is at a loss.  Stannis is more so.  He has known, academically, that Robert’s bastard with Delena exists, that the child he nearly raised as his own heir has free run of Storm’s End, a gift his trueborn daughter will never receive.  The child is Robert made flesh, no gold or green about him, and for a sickening moment Stannis hates him far more than he has any man he’s killed on a battlefield.

 _He’s a child.  He’s done nothing._ Perhaps that makes it worse.

Shireen recovers from the shock before he does.  She’s too young to see the insult in what Robert has done, too young to see anything in Edric Storm but the quailing boy in front of her.  Selyse has given her no lessons in how to greet a bastard cousin, but clearly whatever she says to him has worked.  Stannis watches the children walk away.

“What is Robert _thinking?”_  

“What am _I_ thinking, brother?  What am _I_ thinking.”  Renly’s scowl is a shade of Robert’s, and has none of the cutting power of his smile.  “ _I_ was thinking that the boy ought to meet his father at least once in his life.”

Stannis splutters.  “Are you _mad?”_

“I’ve missed you, brother.”  Renly snorts.  “Gods, look past your own nose for once.  He’s not _Daemon Blackfyre._   He’s a child.  Robert has two sons.  There’s no harm in bringing him with me.”

They stand in silence, Stannis grinding his teeth.

“Prince Stannis!  Prince Renly!”

“Lord Arryn.”  Stannis inclines his head; he does not look over at Renly.

“My son has professed an interest in meeting your daughter.”  A lie, almost certainly.  _My wife has professed an interest in our son marrying your daughter_ , more likely.  It is never too early to begin planning these things, of course, but men with likely sons have become the bane of Stannis’ life.  Lately Lord Velaryon cannot get through a single fleet provisioning report without half a dozen supposedly-charming asides about “dear, clever” Monterys.

“Might I have your permission to escort Lady Shireen to the Tower of the Hand?  When your business with Massey is finished, I have a few other matters to discuss.”

Stannis gives him a long look.  “Shireen!”

She leaves Edric at once, and curtsies perfectly to Lord Arryn.

“Lord and Lady Arryn wish for you to meet Robert Arryn, their heir.  I will rejoin you at the Tower of the Hand.” 

“Yes, Father.”  She bids farewells to Edric and Renly, and Stannis watches her walk away.  She’s done her lady mother proud so far.

Stannis spares a final glare for Renly, and then heads for a flight of stairs.

-

“Under Captain Dehryn, the _Nymeria –“_

“Our fifth _Nymeria.”_

Ser Justin Massey smiles broadly.  “Fifth one’s the charm, your grace.”  Experience has taught him not to wait for Stannis to respond.  “Dehryn was harbored at Dragonstone when the corpses were found.”

“He admits it?”  Massey has clearly not _brought_ him a Dornish sea captain.  The lead cannot be as good as it seems.

“ _Prince Doran_ admits it.”

This is not a complication Stannis needs.  “What does the Prince have to do with it?”

“Nothing, other than apparently growing tired of us harassing his subjects at our port.”  _Us.  Our._ Stannis tries to remember if Massey seemed this presumptuous and irritating before the meeting with Renly, and then tries to remember that Massey has been doing a thankless task with enthusiasm for three years.  _Nymeria_ was the seventh of their seven ships.

If it, too, is a dead end, then the men who left the bodies were on the island during the plague.

“Your grace.”  Massey looks as if this isn’t the first time he’s spoken.  “I’ve also” – he clears his throat – “also had word on the _Lady Velirys_.”

Out of Pentos.  Third to leave the harbor.  Lost in a gale before the smoke had cleared.

“And?”

“Three months before sailing to Dragonstone, she was hired by one Kanno Saltpearl.  A smalltime pirate.  But I’ve been talking to some of the Pentoshi at court –“

The fire that had killed the Beggar King had also displaced half the upper class of Pentos.  Most had scattered around the Free Cities.  Some of them had been foolish enough to come to Westeros, and could be found with the rest of the landless bootlickers who clustered around Robert at feasts.

“Saltpearl could be a bit too loud about his work with the Fat Man.”

“Magister Illyrio.”  It’s a half a correction, half a confirmation.  “You still suspect Targaryen loyalists, then?”

“I more than suspect, your –“

“Your grace!”

Stannis turns his glare on the doorframe.  It’s one of Lord Arryn’s squires.

“Your grace, you’re needed at the Tower of the Hand.”

-

He grinds his teeth viciously.  “Is my daughter unharmed?” he demands, as they round a corner.  _Targaryen loyalists._ Varys and his birds.  A thousand dangers might lurk around any corner, and Maekon is trapped in those too-short chains.

“Yes. Um.”  The boy has dull eyes, half swallowed by flaxen hair.  “Yes, your grace, but…”

Stannis pushes past him as they reach the Tower of the Hand.  Useless.  His daughter is just ahead, standing by another man in Arryn livery.  Her black hair has fallen out of its braid.

“Shireen!”

“My lord father.”  She curtsies.  Her hands are shaking, tangled in her skirt.

He puts a hand on her shoulder, stepping between her and the Arryn man.  “Where is the Hand?”

A yell from an upper room.  “I _won’t!”_ Steps pound towards them, and Stannis sees Lady Arryn, her husband trailing behind her.

“I won’t have her near Sweetrobin!”  She pulls up for a moment upon seeing Stannis, then marches towards him.  “My son has only just recovered from his own illness.  I won’t let you set grayscale upon us, _your grace.”_   Her finger is inches from his chest.  He can feel Shireen shrinking back.

Stannis stares down at the pointing finger.  Her hands are pink and scrubbed, nails half-raw.

“What have you said to my daughter?”

Lady Arryn ignores this.  “If you cared for her, _Prince Stannis,_ you’d have her home in her bed, not here bringing –“

“Lady wife.”  Lord Arryn has reached them at last.  “I’ll handle this.  Return to Robert.”

“What happened?”  Stannis bites out the words.

“I apologize.”  Lord Arryn shakes his head.  “I didn’t realize she’d react like this.  Your daughter acquitted herself with grace.”  This last, as a peace offering.  Stannis is ill-inclined to accept it.

“Maekon will need feeding.”  He turns his back, guiding his daughter along with him.  The dragon will do her good.

Shireen is still shaking.  She’s never faced this on Dragonstone, Stannis realizes.  There are beggars with grayscale scars in the streets despite the efforts of the blackcloaks, the shunned and destitute having nowhere else to turn.  The island still fears contagion.  But Shireen is different.  She’s the dragon’s daughter, she bears dragon scales.  He cannot take her out of the keep without those same beggars calling out as though she bears a cure.  It’s preposterous.  It’s a burden.

It’s better than _this._

“You must keep your shoulders straight,” he tells her.  “You will be Lady of Dragonstone one day.”

“Yes, father.”  She holds tightly to his hand, but he can see her posture change.

“Was I to marry Robert Arryn?”

“No.”  She waits expectantly for more.  “You are my only heir.  Your children with be Baratheons, not Arryns.”

She’s silent, at that.  Shireen has never spoken to him of the little brother she almost had.  He does not know how the loss affected her, or even if the loss affected her, though surely it must have.

“So I must wed Prince Tommen?”

“No.”  He stumbles, trying to find a suitable explanation.

He is saved by a most unlikely hero.  Robert’s Lannister squire again, his eyes wide in terror.  “Your grace – Your grace, I tried to keep them out –“

The squire tries to block their passage.  “The Prince of Dragonstone!”  It’s the voice of a feast announcement.  It’s a warning, to whoever is harassing his dragon.  Stannis shoves past the boy, knocking him to the ground.

“Cowardly squid.”

“You haven’t gone any closer, _my prince._ ”

“I don’t need to test him.” 

Stannis rounds the final corner – curse these gardens, curse every king who needed a new secluded spot to woo another man’s wife – and sees two boys, both holding wooden swords.  Prince Joffrey and Lord Greyjoy.

“He’ll be my dragon some day, anyway.”  Prince Joffrey steps forward, wooden sword at the ready.  “Unlock the gate, Greyjoy.”

Stannis grabs his nephew by the arm.  “What are you doing?”

Joffrey scowls back at him, an “unhand me!” swallowed upon recognizing his uncle.  “I was taking Lord Theon to see our dragon, Uncle.”

“Our dragon?”

The Prince flinches.

“You are a child.  You know nothing of dragons.”  Stannis raises his bad hand, and, with the hook, pulls down the patch that hides his blank white eye and the worst of the scarring around it.  “A boy came to see the dragonpit when Maekon was half this size.  I took this saving his life.  I am the only man who can ride my dragon, and the only man who he would have wounded rather than _eaten._   He is not your sword or your warhorse.  And he is not _yours._ ”

There’s something about Prince Joffrey’s face in thought that reminds Stannis of nothing so much as Lord Baelish.

“Of course, my lord Uncle.”

He bows, as Edric Storm had, though not so low.  It strikes Stannis, not for the first time, that there is nothing of Robert in his face.

-

There’s nothing of Robert in Tommen, either, save perhaps a shared fondness for food, and Myrcella is her mother made flesh.  The two younger royal children sit, one to each side of Shireen, Stannis forced to abandon her for a seat on the other side of Robert.

That, at least, ensures a silent meal.  Robert does not speak to him.  He does not speak to Robert.  These last years, Robert has gone beyond not attending Small Council meetings; now he schedules hunting trips deliberately on days when Stannis has naval issues to raise.  It frankly suits them both.

He watches Tommen and Myrcella, who seem kind enough to Shireen.  He watches Joffrey, sulking at being denied pride of place at his brother’s nameday.  He thinks of Edric Storm, who might as well be Renly, and Renly, who might as well be Robert.

He watches the Queen, dancing with her brother, faces nearly touching – and at that, finally, he draws back.  Preposterous.  He’s chasing ghost lights.

But there’s an unease in him, and it lingers long after the feast is over.

-

He finds himself in the catacombs.

Maekon is a huddled mass in the rain, curled beneath his wings and hissing at anyone who comes near.  Stannis could try flying him out into the storm, but he isn’t sure they’d both come back alive.  Still, he needs _something,_ something to dull the nervous energy inside him and clear his spiraling thoughts.  Perhaps this is why Robert drinks.

There are endless chambers beneath the Red Keep, dusty hallways and short passages for servants.  He lingers, awhile, in a room stacked with dragon skulls.  He remembers them from court as a boy, small enough though not foolish enough to climb between the Black Dread’s teeth.  He wonders what impulse drove Robert to keep them, to stack them here in the darkness instead of having them burned.

He paces through the room, circling around bones and raising the lantern on his hook to get a better view.  He can paint flesh and scale on them now, almost see their glowing eyes.  It’s a foolish exercise, but effective for his goals.

Here, on this one, middle-sized, horns that curve back at just the angle Maekon’s do.  Here a snout almost as long and thin.  Here one, smaller even than Maekon as a hatchling, but –

There is a scream.

He carries no sword here, but he’s drawn his dagger before he reaches the hall.  The lantern swings wildly as he runs, lodged awkwardly on his hook, and as he hits shallow stairs the candle falls away into the darkness.

Light ahead, though.  Light, and swearing voices.

More stairs here, and a door.  He shoves it open with the iron of his bad hand, lantern still dangling uselessly.  On the other side, two men stare at him in shock.

A woman stares at him, from the ground.  One of the men has ahold of her skirts, but she reaches out her arm, clutches Stannis by the ankle.  A servant, she must be, poor clothes and blood all over her.

“Cowards,” Stannis spits, and steps over the woman’s arm, dagger in hand, gleaming in the candleflame.  “Drop your weapons and stand down.”

Both men charge.  One of them, he notes, is armored.  A palace guard.  Years ago, he might have been shocked.  Now it is only the same familiar, burning rage.   He’ll see this man’s head on a spike.

He stabs No-Armor through the belly, thankful for his riding leathers as a knife grazes his face but lodges in his pauldron.  The guard has a sword, and as Stannis fights to pull his dagger back out of No-Armor’s gut, he feels a heavy blow on his arm, right where the metal is tied to the skin.  The pain is sudden and agonizing.

He reels back, keeping only his grip on his dagger, and bites down so hard he tastes blood.

But the guard is reeling back as well.

“Fuck!  Fuck and damn it all to Seven Hells –“  His eyes are wide with terror.  “Your grace – I – your grace –“ 

He runs.

Stannis doesn’t have the strength to follow.  He kneels down beside the fallen woman, ignoring No-Armor’s groans.  Her coppery hair is stained redder still with blood.  Her hands are bloody, their nails broken, and she reasserts her grip on his ankle with less strength than before.

“ _Stef-fon.”_

There’s blood in her mouth.  Internal injuries.  They were beating her to death.

“Who are you?”

With her other arm, shaking, she points down the hallway.  _“Steff…”_

And then she’s gone.  Blood on the brain, perhaps, or too much damage to the heart – he’s not a Maester.  She twitches, kicking out for a moment, gripping his ankle with the grip of the dead.  She’s gone.

Stannis swallows his impulse to cry for a guard.  He’s just seen how much they can be trusted.  And No-Armor won’t be moving anytime soon.  With the dagger out, he might never move again.

Stannis walks, up the hall, into what are clearly disused servants quarters.  Bloodstains mark a path to an open door.

He is not surprised, at what he finds there. 

Just more of the boiling rage, the fire that eats him from inside, the pointless fury at injustice in an uncaring world.

_“Steffon.”_

It was the name they had put on the coffin, the little coffin, hidden in the crypts.  The name of a son who’d never lived.

This Steffon is as small as Shireen was, when he first saw her.  Thin, twisted arms.  Bits of black hair, still clinging to the shattered skull –

Stannis does not weep.  He does not pray.  But he stands, still and silent, for a long moment, before leaving the little room, before crying out “murder!” to men he cannot trust.

-

“I can _walk.”_

Massey is to one side of him, one of that cursed Maester’s flunkies to the right.  Young Lord Caron bobs around them all, holding a spare cloak and hoping to be of some use.

Stannis grimaces.  His arm is bound so tight to his body he can scarcely move it.  The swordblow had dented the iron, twisting it and driving it into the flesh of his forearm. Maester Pycelle had made noises about milk of the poppy before cutting it out; Stannis had refused.  He needs his head about him.

They trail him all the way to the Council chambers, picking up stragglers along the way.  The noise is very nearly a distraction from the pain in his arm.  Without the weight of the hook, the phantom of his lost hand has returned at full force, a searing outline of flame.  He keeps his eyes forward.

Lord Baelish has a list of guardsmen.  Varys has a name to put to No-Armor’s corpse.  Robert has not bothered to attend.  Renly, Master of Laws for all of two months, keeps glancing to the stump of Stannis’ arm and then away.

“Of course,” says Baelish, “the attack on your grace was beyond the pale.  But there are… Prince Renly?  How many deaths in the Red Keep this year alone?”

Renly starts.  “The guardsmen would know that better than I, Lord Baelish.”

“Of course.”

Baelish needles Renly.  Varys needles Baelish.  Lord Arryn stares at his hands. 

Stannis sits and fumes.  By the end of the meeting, he has received nothing other than a vague promise of investigation (from Varys – the _Mad King’s_ Varys) and a series of even vaguer inquiries after his health.  He remains in his chair as the Council files out.

One man remains.

 “You know the child was Robert’s.”

Stannis glares at Lord Arryn.  “I had _surmised.”_

Arryn takes a long breath.  “They weren’t the first.”

“The first bastard?  I’m well aware of that –“

“The first deaths.”  Lord Arryn meets his gaze, long and steady.  The air hangs heavily around them.

“The child looked like Shireen.”  It’s at once confession and cowardice.  He’s dancing around the truth like any other courtier, and suddenly he hates himself for it.  “The child looked _nothing_ like the Prince –“

“Brother?”

Stannis starts, hitting his arm on the table.  As he blinks away the pain, he sees Renly in the doorway.  _How much did he hear?_   He barely knows his brother.  He can’t truly trust him.  Nor can he burden him with treason, not when he’s still scarcely more than a child.

Renly lays one hand next to Stannis’ elbow.  If he has any thoughts about what he overheard, they aren’t visible on his face.  “Loras says his old nurse swears by this.”  _This_ is a small bundle, smelling of lemons and strongwine.  “For your arm,” he clarifies, into Stannis’ baffled face.

“There’ve been other murders in the Keep.”

Renly sighs.  “The correct phrase is ‘thank you.’”

“You’re Master of Laws, Renly.  _Earn it._ You let Baelish walk all over you today.  If you need _me_ to tell you about attacks right beneath your feet –“

“Her name was Rosylin.”

“What?”

“Her name was Rosylin.  Her father was a baker.  You’ve spent two hours wailing about her.  You ought to at least have learned her _name.”_

Lord Arryn makes a noise.  Stannis raises a hand to silence him.

There’s a cutting edge to Renly’s words.  Stannis can see the woman’s eyes, still, one half-swollen.  Who she had been before that moment had seemed irrelevant.  If he took time to put a name to all the guiltless dead in Westeros –

But if he did not, then no one would.

“I’m sorry.”

Renly jerks backwards.  “You’re – you’re what?”  He’d come here to argue, for all he’d brought a posset.  They both had.  This is dangerous new ground.

“I’m sorry.”  The words come no easier the second time.

Renly straightens his doublet.  “Well.  Yes.”  He glances at Lord Arryn for help, but Arryn still bears the expression of a man wishing desperately to be somewhere across the Sunset Sea.

Stannis flails about for solid ground.  “Her father.  The baker.  Has he been notified?”

 “I don’t…”  Renly looks at the ceiling, then pulls himself back together.  “I mean to say, if he has not, then I will make sure that he is.  With a pension.”  This last is a new idea in a bright voice.  Renly has collected himself, all Robert in his bearing once again.  His smile, though, is still a child’s smile.  “And now, gentlemen, I leave you to your … business.”

-

There’s little business to be left to.  Carron enters as soon as Renly leaves, bearing offers from blacksmiths.  Massey is right behind him, hoping for a private discussion of Pentoshi shipping records.  And there is Shireen, halfway down the corridor to his quarters, asking to be taken up on Maekon again now that the rains have stopped.  For the rest of the week, any private talks with Lord Arryn are rushed, harried, and inconclusive.

Stannis binds his stump to the harness for the ride back.  Each Kings Landing blacksmith had been trying to outshine the next in the hope of royal patronage.  He’d been presented with gold-plated pieces of art and clockwork monstrosities.  He wants a _hook,_ identical to the last, so that once more he can forget its presence.

Maekon shakes himself as Stannis frees him of the chains, and clicks his teeth in pleasure.  The former garden is a wasteland, now, with ash an inch thick on the ground.

He helps Shireen into the harness, one handed.  A week in Kings Landing seems to have shrunken her.  Home will do them both good.

“Father,” she says, turning to look at him, “did you have nightmares in the castle, too?”

“No.”  Then he narrows his eyes.  “Nightmares?”  Does she have them at home?

“I…”  She shakes her head.  “It was foolish.  But J- but I heard, about the Dragon Princess, and I dreamed they’d come to-“  He can see her jaw clenching. 

He pushes away the sudden image of his daughter, stabbed half-a-hundred times and left bleeding on the ground. “All men have nightmares.  We must not let them rule us.”

“Yes, father.”  She lifts her chin, but her shoulders are still hunched in on themselves.  He tries to think of something else, something Cressen might have said, but nothing comes.

“Up,” he says, instead, and Maekon shrieks for joy.

-

He goes straight from the dragonpit to the library.  He doesn’t know what he hopes to find there.  The Targaryens left him little, and most of what he’s added over the years have been crumbling bits of dragonlore or scrolls of shipping records.  A list of failed hatchings after the Dance will hardly help him prove the Queen is cuckolding his brother.

Night falls.  Two candles gutter out.  He stares at mildewed pages until his vision blurs.  Nothing.  He has nothing to offer Lord Arryn.  Without proof, solid proof, Robert will only take the accusations as the prelude to Stannis setting the Red Keep ablaze.  He’ll lose his head and take Arryn down with him.

“Stannis.”

He starts up.  Selyse stands in the doorframe, holding a plate of sliced bread.

“Lady wife.”  His voice creaks.

“Is the fleet still expected to survive on fairy fire and grumpkins?”  She lays the plate beside him on the desk.  He can feel her eyes on his arm.

He makes no answer.

“Eat,” she says.

He obeys.  Selyse looks over _A History of the Petty Kings,_ then closes it and returns it to a shelf.  “Come to bed, husband.”

They keep separate chambers, and they have shared a bed less and less frequently since her second pregnancy.  Even on the nights she joins him, more often than not they simply lay side by side, though sometimes he’ll wake and find she’s curled into him for comfort.  He has no objections to any of it.  In this whirling world, Selyse is solid and sure.

Tonight, though, she paces, eyes narrowed.  “We’ve had a raven from House Arryn.  Lord Arryn comes in two weeks, to discuss the betrothal of our daughter and his son.”  A hissed breath.  “She cannot marry Robert Arryn, my lord.  Not an heir.  We spoke of this.”

Stannis blinks.  “There’s to be no betrothal.  Lord Arryn and I-“ he focuses desperately on the wrapping around his stump “-agreed to use it as a pretext for-“ and here he does hesitate, desperately, fatally, surely she can tell- “-for matters of court best discussed in private.”

He cannot tell her the truth.  She knows how to hold her silence, it’s true, better than half the Small Council, but if he could bend to tell his wife, then she could bend to tell her father, and he his brother, and soon half the Reach would be buzzing in his ear and marching on Kings Landing.  Even if she held her silence, there is the King.  Without proof, his plans are only treason. 

He swore an oath to protect her.  Surely that is a greater duty than the truth.

She holds his gaze for a long while.  “I see.”

She sits on the edge of the bed, running a brush through her hair, and makes no move to lie beside him.  There is a comfort in watching her.  He spent too long in Kings Landing watching Cersei.

“I spoke too harshly, my lord.”  Now her knuckles are white around the brush.

He does not reply.  She must be taking offense at his silence, misreading it.  He does not know what to say.  “There are many high lords with younger sons,” he offers, finally.  “I know you mislike the Dornish-“

“And the Dornish mislike you.”  She takes his peace offering for what it is.  “There is Lord Stark, as well as Prince Doran.  I had thought to write the Lady Catelyn, as she seems the only mother in the Seven Kingdoms yet to write _me.”_

“And I have heard rumors that Lord Velaryon has a son.”

Finally, she laughs.  “Indeed?  Has he cornered you in the privies again?”

She blows out the last of the candles, and lays down, warm beside him.  He is half asleep when he feels her hand on his good arm.

“I will never bear you another child, Stannis.”  A whisper in the darkness.  “She is all we have.  I _must_ do the best for her.”

And he must protect them.  He must protect them both.  The thought follows him, fitfully, into sleep.

-

“What is that _smell?_ ”

Three years of work, of squinting at family trees, of watching Robert’s golden-haired children grow.  He will gladly suffer for the realm, but this – this seems excessive.

Lord Arryn casts his eyes about the room for a topic of conversation.  The walls are hung with velvet.  The candles are sputtering.  One of the useless endtables appears to be supporting itself on wooden breasts.  And everywhere, there is a scent like flowers gone to rot.

The women raise their _children_ here?

He had banned whorehouses on Dragonstone years ago.  The fear of greyscale had done what the fear of the law could not, though even now his blackcloaks were more inclined to “investigate” than to enforce.  This particular institution was owned by Lord Baelish, and it likely earned him more gold from Robert than his council position did.

“Your grace, my lord!”  The horrible little steward is back, women trailing behind him.  The man even has the look of Baelish about him, though clearly none of the brains.  “Lady Draya and the Golden Rose –“

One of the women is coming towards him.  Selyse wore more when they conceived a _child._

He jerks away from clutching fingers.  “I requested Merienne.”  Lord Arryn is no help.  Lord Arryn is barely keeping a straight face. 

“You have your brother’s tastes, m’lord.”  The whisper in his ear fakes disappointment.  Stannis clings to the lead like a drowning man even as he leans away.

-

“A brothel, your grace?”

“Those were my instructions, Ser Davos.”  He checks himself.  He’s talking to a married man.  “I request nothing more of you beyond investigation.”

“Of _what?”_

Stannis massages his temples.  The castle is quiet.  The door is firmly shut.  He is a scarce minute’s run from his dragon, he is alone in a room with a man whose only insensibility is a willingness to die for him, and fear still creeps up his spine.

It had been Renly, this time.  Renly, sauntering into his quarters like he owned them, a bright smile on his face.

“I never would have guessed where _you’ve_ been, brother!”  He’d laughed.

Stannis had said nothing.  He rarely needed to say anything to Renly, who filled every silence with ease.  Renly would laugh his way through this, issue an invitation to dinner, and then depart in search of someone new to smile at.

“Why, I was so inspired, Loras and I had to mount a trip of our own!”

Stannis cannot see the logic of assigning Renly a squire barely younger than himself.  If the Tyrell boy was a belated political hostage, Robert has done a poor job of it.

“You should not be introducing your squire to loose women, Renly.  You have a duty –“  He’d cut off in confusion at the gale of laughter.

“You hardly need to worry, Stannis.  _I’ll_ be fathering no bastards.”  He’d leant over the desk, his next words a staged whisper.  “But as for that business I, of course, know nothing about – Chataya is quite good at seeing that her girls drink their moon tea.  If I _were_ to be assisting you – and of course I am not – I would have to report that my efforts came up empty.”

As though it were a game.  Stannis had hissed something at his brother, words that he doesn’t recall.  They’d hit empty air.

_What does he know?  What does he know, and who has he told?_

Shireen is less a child than Renly.  Stannis’ life may very well be in his brother’s hands – his brother, who is half a Tyrell.  Lord Mace and Lord Tywin could find common ground, could send House Baratheon plummeting into ruin, and all for one of Renly’s ill-timed jests.

Stannis blinks himself back into the present.  “My brother has a bastard there.  Report to me.  Tell no one.”

Ser Davos is clearly on the verge of a dozen questions.  “This troubles you more than-“

“I did not call you here to discuss my state of mind.”

Any other man would quail.  Any other man would _fall silent._ Ser Davos merely breaths out, as though Stannis has disappointed him.  “I don’t ask for state secrets,” he says.  “I ask what I can do to _help.”_

Stannis stares at their hands – or what is left of them – inches apart on the table.  Davos’ fists are clenched.  His own good hand is white-knuckled.  He tries for the words that will send this man away.

They come out, instead, in a weak whisper.  “Your duty, ser,” he says.  “You can do your duty.”

-

He remembers the siege.  Fear had eaten at him as much as hunger.  Fear of failing Robert, fear of failing Renly, fear of the roiling men who wanted to surrender.  He’d paced Storm’s End, searching for somewhere in its halls where fear and duty could not find him.

He’d had no one to rely on, truly, but Cressen.  The Maester had aged a year in every week, and even now Stannis can see echoes of starvation in his face. 

They’d eaten the ravens and the rats.  They’d waited for a Tyrell charge, men too weak to hold their swords.  He remembers the bodies, swollen and rotting, _we cannot afford to waste good meat._  The only blessing in all of it, he can see now, is that he’d known his duty.  He would hold Storm’s End, and he would hold it until his death.

He had chosen Robert.  He had chosen to die, and to lead men into death, for Robert.

But there are no battle lines anymore.  Robert’s children are bastards.  That fact makes Stannis the heir, and that is all Robert will see.  Stannis has Maekon.  That makes him – he isn’t sure what that makes him.  A target, a power, a prince.

The siege had ended.  Ser Davos had sailed in, for gold or for kindness, and given them another month of life.  Ned Stark had ridden in, to be covered with glory for being next to Lord Tyrell when the fat coward had handed over his sword.

 _Black of hair, black of hair, black of hair._ There will be no rescue now.  There are only old books and Lord Arryn.

When the ground falls out from under him, he is scarcely surprised.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because I wasn't sure how to tag for this... In addition to the warnings in the tags, Non-Canonical Character Death of a character who is minor in this story but plays a major role in the books.

Like all truly terrible things, it begins with a feast.

The dragon tower is finally repaired, and Stannis spends as much of the day out with Maekon as he dares.  He and Lord Arryn have acquired a stack of genealogies, a dozen black-haired bastards, and three reliable witnesses prepared to testify that the Queen and her brother are inappropriately close.  A fourth was prepared to say he saw them kiss, but only for gold; Lord Arryn is having him watched, and they might do better to have him killed.

That the children are bastards can be definitively proven; that they are the Kingslayer’s cannot.  It is this that delays them now, month by agonizing month.

Stannis cannot remember the rationale behind this feast.  The hall is only half-full, but every corner is infested with musicians.  He is seated, as always, as low on the royal table as Robert can place him.  Another inch, and his chair would fall off the dais.

He is picking at a plate of fish when he sees a hand close around his wine goblet.

“Stannis!”  Renly takes a stolen drink.  “I thought you’d never make it back.”

Stannis can barely hear him over the din.  He nods; Renly takes it as invitation to continue.

“I’m leaving for Storm’s End after the feast – I’ve been having trouble with some of the shipping in the bay, and Lord Tarth thinks it’s your pirates.  You and your dragon could be some help.”  Renly’s exaggerated sigh is much louder than his next few words.  “Besides, you’ve never come to visit.”

Stannis looks up.  Renly’s eyes are averted.

To _visit._   The thought of being Lord of Storm’s End has been marred for years by disturbing visions of his dragon, starving to death in the dark.  Dragonstone is his home.  But all that cannot wash away Robert’s injustice.  He has no desire to see Renly, sleeping in their father’s chambers, laughing with Tyrells in their mother’s gardens.   

He remembers Lord Arryn’s words, years ago.  _House Baratheon cannot be seen to be divided._   They are three brothers and a single trueborn child.

“I cannot leave tonight.”

The words are as good as a yes.  Renly claps him on the shoulder.

“Well, then, brother, I-“

“Renly!”  Robert’s voice, a boom.  Stannis grits his teeth.  “What are you doing down there with Stannis?  He won’t shit you out a dragon egg, you know!”

He leaves before the dancing starts.

-

He spends the night with _The Lineages and Histories of the Great Houses of the Seven Kingdoms_ , copying down Baratheons and Lannisters, awakening after three hours of sleep with an inkstained face.  Farring tries to speak to him while handing him his riding leathers, but quails after a few words.  Dawn has yet to break, and he makes it to Maekon’s tower without speaking to another living soul.

They fly out into the gray light over the bay.

He’s meeting with some of Lord Redwyne’s men to discuss refits to _Fury_.  It is not work that requires a dragon, or, truly, work that requires the Master of Ships.  It is work, however, that gets him out of the Red Keep.    He lets Maekon fly freely, twisting and spiraling, skimming so low that saltspray hits his face.  Finally, though, he pulls the dragon up out of his pursuit of a diving whale, and heads southwards towards an anchored group of ships.

 _Godsgrief_ rocks under Maekon’s weight, and her crew lets up a ragged cheer.  Two men lug a cow into position as Stannis fastens the chains.  The Redwyne captain has already sent over a longboat.  The efficiency of it all lifts a weight from his shoulders.  Robert had named him Master of Ships as an afterthought; it might as well have been Master of Coin or Laws.  But he has put his all into the Royal Fleet, and even his brother would struggle to find fault with it now.

From the deck of _Jonquil’s Smile,_ Stannis looks over to see Maekon still watching him.  He fights down the preposterous urge to wave.

“I fail to see why we should pay _your_ prices for _Northern_ timber,” he says.  One Reachman sighs; the other launches into a passionate defense. 

He spends much of the day in this manner.  When Ser Dollen and Captain Broadfield suggest a meal break, he takes Maekon up for a quarter-hour, returning with a large shark and a renewed sense of energy.  He crunches on hardtack while Faren Storm, who captains the _Godsgrief,_ talks to him about their so-far useless attempts at locating truly flame-proof sails.  Stannis has no ear for storytelling, but he still finds himself nodding along as Storm lambastes Maesters and swindlers and too-clever young sailors.

By the time he and Maekon wing back for the capital, he despises one Reachman and grudgingly respects the other, he has a useful stack of requisitions, diagrams, and cost analyses, and night is falling.

By the time he lands in the dragon tower, Jon Arryn has been unconscious for two hours. 

He will never wake again.

-

“Lord Arryn!”

Farring squares his shoulders.  “Yes, your grace.  He took ill last night.  The Grand Maester said,” and the boy swallows, “that he’s dying.”

Dying.  Lord Arryn.  Old, but in good health to have taken ill so suddenly. 

Poison.

He knows it to his bones.  Lord Arryn was poisoned.  He tries to push his way past squires and lackeys to see him, but he realizes, hemmed all around by wailers and whisperers, that it is pointless.  Lord Arryn will not suddenly rally just because Prince Stannis Baratheon stands at his bed.  If he’d been here earlier, he could have spoken with him.  Could have gotten his last advice, or at least his last words.  They might have been able to call Robert to his deathbed, and –

 _Speak of him, and he appears._   Trumpets.  Robert, outpacing them all, shoving his way past the crowd and his own guard alike.  He spares no glance for Stannis.

 _“Poison.”_   The words die on his lips.  He has no proof.

He needed Lord Arryn.  The _realm_ needed Lord Arryn.  He was the only man who could tell the king hard truths and be believed.  Even were the Queen’s children not bastards, his death might break Robert’s reign.   As it is…

Stannis returns to his rooms in a daze.  Years of work, and the Lannisters struck first.  Someone must have talked, someone must have guessed.  How much had Lord Arryn shared with his wife?  How much does Renly know?

This will mean Tywin Lannister as Hand, and that _cannot_ be borne.  Treason on this scale won’t merely send Lannister’s son and daughter to the block.  Robert’s wrath could ruin House Lannister – or start a civil war.  And Lord Tywin is patient, ruthless, and far better at court politics than Stannis.

 _I have proof._   But paper won’t mean anything to Robert.   The proof was for the rest of the world.  _Lord Arryn_ would have swayed Robert.

He slams the door behind him.  His ears are ringing.

Bryan Farring and Devan Seaworth are standing inside.  They give him short bows, but neither risks a word.  Stannis falls into a chair, and stares at his fist and his hook.

He doesn’t know how long he stays there.  His squires leave, and then return.  Castle servants move quietly in and out.  He tries to look ahead to the future, to readjust his plans, and cannot.  He’ll keep going.  He’ll have to keep going.  And in the end, he’ll tell Robert the truth, and he’ll argue his points, and he’ll walk to the block on his king’s commands.

“Your grace?”  One of the castle servants.  They’ve brought fresh jugs of lemon water.

He very nearly drinks.

His hand jerks back of its own accord, spilling the water down his doublet.  Devan Seaworth stares at him, wide-eyed.

He cuts off the boy’s word of concern.  “How much food have they brought up?  Today and yesterday?”

“No more than usual, your grace.  They generally only bring it for you.”

Stannis hates dining in the crowded castle halls, and avoids it whenever possible.  He has for years.  Anyone would know, then, that food and drink could be easily taken to his quarters without suspicion.  “Has anyone tasted any of it?”

“Ser Justin – as a jape.  He likes to pretend to us that he thinks the saltwater is wine, and then spit it up.”  Seaworth delivers this in as flat a voice as possible, briefly tired beyond his years.  “I’ve only eaten in the hall, and Bryen’s been feeling ill.”

Ill.  _No, it can’t be._

He tries to keep his voice calm.  “How ill?  How long?”

Seaworth takes a step back.  “Since – since midday.  He went back to our room an hour ago.”  A swallow.  “Your grace, do you think it’s poison?”

He doesn’t answer.  Lord Arryn dead – that’s one thing.  Old men fall ill all the time.  His own death following on Arryn’s heels surely couldn’t fail but look suspicious.  Would the Queen be that desperate?  That foolish?

Or does she know what the whole court must know, that Robert would take his death as a blessing?

His brother wouldn’t mourn him, not caught up with grief for Lord Arryn.  His brother might scarcely notice.  They’d burn his body on Dragonstone, and set her abominations at his dragon.

His dragon.

He’s at the door before he grasps where his feet are taking him.  Can a dragon be poisoned?  He’s seen Maekon sulk after bad meat, but never truly seen him ill.  Surely no swordsman would risk the dragon, even chained – but the tower is open.  Could an archer reach it from another wall?  Maekon’s eyes, the soft scales at the base of his throat – and his wings.  Stannis tastes hot blood and seawater.  A few lucky shots could cripple the dragon for months, leave Maekon and Stannis both trapped and helpless in the Red Keep.

There are men behind him – his own men.  He is running.

The dragon tower is close.  Up a flight of stairs, into a hallway.  Stannis slows.  He can hear the rumble of Maekon’s breathing even through the thick wall.  The barred door is just ahead, and –

“Stop that man!”

Blackwaters is on the intruder in an instant, locking an elbow around his neck and holding a dagger to his belly.  The man barely struggles.  He’s dressed as a servant, and carrying a sack – an empty sack.  Stannis flings it to the ground.

“Trespasser,” hisses Blackwaters, his violet eyes gleaming.  “What do you want done with him, your grace?”

For all that he’s changed his surname, Ser Aurane is a bastard, and a Velaryon one at that.  Birth alone shouldn’t make a man untrustworthy.  Ser Davos has more honor in his lost fingers than half the high lords in Westeros.  But Blackwaters holds none of Stannis’ secrets, and Stannis intends to keep it that way. 

“What were you doing here?” Stannis demands of the prisoner.

A few burbles, _yer grace, yer grace._   Blackwaters digs in with the dagger.

“Enough.”

He steps away, unbolts the door.  He can see the spines on Maekon’s back, moving as he breathes.  Stannis whistles softly.

Maekon raises his head, clicking his teeth.  He twists his neck, and brings one golden eye level with Stannis’ face.

He’s unharmed.

Stannis takes a look around the dragontower.  No food but a few charred bones.  The chains are solid.  His dragon is safe, for now.  There’s still the matter of the stranger in the tower, and finding what had happened to the contents of his sack.  Poison can be drunk, eaten, inhaled – nothing is safe.  Nowhere in this castle is safe.

“He had a dagger, your grace.”  Blackwaters has passed the prisoner to another of Stannis’ men.  “A pretty little thing.”  He tosses it up with one hand, and Stannis sees the glint of gold.

“Armed.  Trespassing.”  Stannis glares.  “Take him to the guards.”  Treat him like a trespasser, any trespasser.  Follow the law.  _Let no one know what I suspect._ Not the Queen, not the King, not Aurane Blackwaters. 

He sets two of the men who’ve followed him at each end of the hall, and sends the rest off in a dozen different directions.  Finally, he settles himself into the crook of Maekon’s wing, dagger balanced on his knees, staring out into the darkness.  The night is clouded over, as dark and solid as a tomb, and the only light in the tower comes from Maekon’s slitted eyes.  His scales are hot even through Stannis’ leathers, and the air is thick and smoky despite the open wall, but for the first time since Lord Arryn fell ill, Stannis feels something close to safe.

He spends perhaps an hour disturbed only by his thoughts.  He has to get out of here.

If someone is targeting Maekon – _if_ someone is targeting Maekon – then he cannot remain in King’s Landing.  He needs to fly to Dragonstone, and quickly, to decide on his next course of action.  His own death is one thing.  Maekon belongs to more than himself.  He is the bulwark of Robert’s crown, the death of the Beggar King, the threat that keeps a second Ironborn rebellion at bay.  He and the secret Stannis carries are the only things that can keep House Baratheon on the throne. 

A knock at the door sends him to his feet, and Maekon with him.

“Prince Stannis?”  The voice is muffled, the speaker clearly some feet from the door.  Maekon’s low growl shakes the air around Stannis.

Good hounds, he has always heard, instinctively know when a stranger or supposed friend means their master harm.  There’s many a meandering ballad about a dog disbelieved, generally ending with the creature starving itself to death on its master’s grave.  Robert is fond of them.  Maekon, sadly, does not possess this instinct.  If Stannis were to shun every man the dragon growls at, he would soon be alone in a tower, attempting to shun himself.

“Yes?”  He’s drowned out by another rumble from the dragon, and chokes on smoke.

“Forty-five, thirty-three.”  A second voice, higher pitched and closer to the door.  What the password lacks in romance, it makes up for in practicality.  Stannis pushes past Maekon’s nose, and edges himself out the door.

Devan Seaworth and Justin Massey wait in the hall.  Seaworth is holding a bundle wrapped in sackcloth – _The Lineages_.  Stannis has no intention of letting it slip back into Pycelle’s hands.

Stannis takes the book from his squire, looking at Ser Justin.

“Your grace.”  Massey straightens his spine.  “I sought you in your chambers, and found only panic and your squires.  Young Seaworth was kind enough to aid me in passing my message on.  The king rides north.”

Stannis starts.  “ _Now?_ Why?”

“After the funeral, of course.  He aims to make Lord Stark Hand of the King.”  Massey shakes his head.  “The Handship is yours by rights, your grace, if you don’t mind my presumption.  And then to find – poison?”

They are alone in the hallway.  Massey may lick strategic boots, but he’s kept Stannis’ secrets before.  Devan is Ser Davos’ son.  “Lord Arryn was poisoned.  I was the next target.” 

“Or perhaps – forgive me, your grace – the only target?  Lord Arryn dies, and in the confusion, Varys or another seeks to be rid of you?”

Stannis ignores him.

 _Lord Stark._   Robert’s _true_ brother, Jon Arryn’s foster son.  Honorable to a fault.  _Robert would believe him._

Not Renly.  He cannot go to Renly, who has almost as much to gain as Stannis by seeing Cersei’s children disinherited, who Robert scorns and spoils in equal measure.  _He won’t shit you out a dragon egg._   Robert doesn’t want a coalition among his brothers.

_Lord Stark._

And he knows what he must do.

“I fly.  Tonight.”

Seaworth and Massey goggle at him for a moment.  He jerks the parcel out of his squire’s arms, shifting the sackcloth.  _The Lineages.  “Descriptions of Many High Lords and Noble Ladies and Their Children_.”  He’ll need this.  Lord Stark will need this.

Massey steps forward, smiling widely.  “I was saddened to hear that Lady Selyse fell ill, and so suddenly.”

It takes him a moment to realize that this is an _excuse,_ a lie, and not another disaster.

“I will make your apologies to the court, of course.”  Now Massey bows, every inch the gallant.  Devan Seaworth sighs.

“And my people here, Ser Justin.  You will keep them safe.  Seaworth and Farring – return them to Dragonstone within the week.”  Children, children in his care.  He has taken much from Ser Davos.  He will not let Lannister poison take a son.

Massey kneels, and swears, and Seaworth kneels beside him.  His eyes are wide with worry.

How many suffer, for hate and fear of one man?  The greyscale plague – it had touched every home on his island, from the hovels to the towers and the keeps, dead piled in the streets.  And yet Stannis was untouched, and Maekon was untouched, and even his daughter had lived to wear her scars like battle wounds.  And _this,_ now –

He grinds his teeth.  He does not bother for the ritual of raising Massey to his feet.  Instead he turns, clutching the tome to his chest, and enters the dragon tower.

Maekon hisses and clicks, nearly bowling him over with a bump from his snout.

“Still,” Stannis says.  “Easy.”

Maekon shifts as Stannis straps on the harness, his eyes on the black sky.  By the time Stannis mounts, the dragon is trembling with repressed energy.

“Fly.”

And he does.

-

It’s still dark when he lands on Dragonstone, but dawn is beginning to creep into the sky.  Some of his men have spotted Maekon despite the gloom, and three stablehands are waiting with a cow by the time he climbs the ladder out of the dragonpit.  He barely spares them a nod.

Across the courtyard, up the stairs, into his study.  The rising sun follows him, and he tries to catch his breath.  If Robert is to believe him still on Dragonstone, he can’t fly out in broad daylight.  Every ship in the harbor would know him.  Besides, there are reasons he’s landed here instead of pressing on North.

He drops _The Lineages_ heavily onto the desk, and pulls out paper and quill.

The first goes to Cressen.  It is not the first letter the Maester has handled “in the event of my death,” but he still feels worried eyes upon him as he walks away, and regrets the cutting edge of his voice.

Selyse, he learns, has been at Crackclaw Point for two days, and it is only the sight of her ship returning that stops him from another mad flight.  He sends Horpe with a dozen men to the docks, and, in a shot of fear, Chyterring with half a dozen more to the door of his daughter’s chamber.  He’s not himself.  He knows it.  But since the man in the dragon tower, he has scarcely been able to breathe.

He calls for Ser Davos, and meets him in the little room where he first kept Maekon.

“Speak of what I ask you now to no one, not even my lady wife,” he says.  “I will leave as soon as night falls.  I know not for how long.”  He keeps the words sharp and brisk.  “If you hear of my death, my treason, the death of my dragon, you must take my family across the Narrow Sea.”

He meets his knight’s eyes.  “Swear it.”

 “On my honor.”

There is a moment of silence.  Stannis cannot decipher Davos’ expression.  The fact that he is asking this man to go into exile wars with the fact that he is asking this man only for his duty. “There will be coin at your disposal,” he offers, finally, and can see they are the wrong words even as they leave his mouth.  “Devan is safe,” and those are scarce better.  Ser Davos has the cunning to see his own family safe, but the reminder is cruel.  Stannis made vows as well.  He swore to protect those under his rule, and he has failed and failed again.

Selyse is somehow easier.

She takes both the letter and his words with an even stare and an even voice.

“You have half of this.  Cressen has the rest.  In the event of my death, send it out with every raven in the keep.” 

“I will.”

“As far as Robert knows, I will remain on Dragonstone.  The secret won’t hold long, but keep it at least until the court rides North.”

She holds his eyes, searching for something.  “I will.”

He does not remind her again not to open the letter while he lives.  She will or she won’t.  She has known for years that he is keeping secrets from her; he doesn’t have it in him now to make excuses. 

She closes her eyes for a long moment.  “There are guards at Shireen’s door.”

The words rip their way out of his throat.  “I cannot keep you safe.”

Selyse looks down.  Her voice is low.  “You try as hard as any man in the Seven Kingdoms.  It’s not your making that the gods are cruel to us.”  Her hand reaches for him, suddenly tight on his upper arm.  “If you mean to never return, at least tell your daughter goodbye.”

 _If you mean to never return._   He sees the _Windproud,_ fighting in the bay, and brings his good hand to cover hers. 

“I will.”

-

His father’s hand on his shoulder.  He remembers his father’s face, and his mother’s, but somehow in the last memory they are blurred and far away.  He cannot recall if Robert was there, though he knows he must have been.  He can recite entire useless poems that he learned years before that moment.  But he cannot recall what his father told him, or if his mother spoke at all. 

He hadn’t known they were the last words, hadn’t known he needed to fix them in his memory.  Every second of the _Windproud’s_ storm is clearer.

“Obey your lady mother,” he tells Shireen, “and Maester Cressen.  Do not stray from the keep, and mind your lessons.”

She nods, confused.  He is telling her nothing he has not said a thousand times before.  The late afternoon sun lights up her chamber, and her black hair shines.

She ought to ride a dragon, his daughter.  She is the only trueborn Baratheon of her generation, and by Black or Green reckoning either second or third in line for the crown.  If he dies at Winterfell, she’ll never hold Dragonstone.  The smallfolk who call out to the dragon’s daughter will abandon her as quickly as they did the Targaryens.  She’d be lucky to be lady of some keep, Bar Isle or Crackclaw Point.  If he dies a traitor, she’ll be lucky to _survive_ , married to a Seaworth son across the Narrow Sea.

“Father?” she asks him.  “How long will you be gone?”

“I don’t know.” He looks down, grinds his teeth.  “Some weeks.”  Fathers are meant to tell so many lies to their children.  _I may never return_ is stifled in his throat.

She nods again, her straight back and proud chin the echo of her lady mother.  “And… father?”  She jumps after him as he turns to leave.  “Father!”

He bends at the pull of her hand, kneeling down.

“Take care for Maekon.  If he catches another whale, you must make him eat it _all_ of it, not leave it to rot.” 

He nods, solemnly.  Her eyes are sharp, and he wonders if he is not the only one refusing to speak of death.  “I will inform him directly.”

“Good.”  She looks at the ground.  He reaches out with his good hand, on impulse, and takes both of hers.

“I’ll miss you,” he tells her, and for the first time today, the only time, he finds the right words.

-

He leaves at nightfall.  He carries two saddlebags, clothes, coin, saltmeat, _Lineages_.  Selyse kisses him, and says nothing.   He can feel her eyes on his back.

Maekon is restless, shaking his chains and clicking his jaws.  Stannis speaks to him softly and rubs his neck, but it’s little use.  Stannis is afraid, and his dragon has always fed on his moods.  There’ll be nothing to calm either of them until they take flight.

 A large fish lands by Stannis’ boots.

Maekon, freed of half his chains, whirls and snaps out a quick flame, then draws back into the depths of the pit with his prize.  Stannis turns to the man on the ladder.

“Ser Davos.”

“Braavos.  Good houses, east of the wharf.  Ask for Alleria Saan.”  Davos’ voice is gruff.

“Why are you here?”  The words come before he processes Davos’ statement.

“Because you should know.”  Davos looks up at him.  “If word of your death should come, that’s where we’ll go.  If word of your death should come, and prove false – if you survive whatever hell you’re flying into…”  He takes a deep breath.  “Then follow us.  Come to Braavos.”

Even Maekon is silent.  Finally, Davos speaks again, with half of a smile.  “I’ll hold my oath.”

Davos helps him finish fastening the saddlebags, his bribe of the fish enough to earn Maekon’s tolerance.  Stannis fights again for words, but perhaps this silence is enough.  The one man who followed him before he rode a dragon.  There’s a comfort in Ser Davos, as there is a comfort in Selyse.  Something solid and unchanging.

He cannot fail them.  He _cannot._

-

The flight North is agonizingly slow.  They travel at night, following the coastline.  When there is no fishing to be found, Stannis leaves silver in fields and by huts to compensate for Maekon’s raids on sheep.  The worst of it comes after White Harbor, when they turn inland.  A summer snow catches them, and for three days, Maekon sits in a steaming sulk, refusing to fly.

They reach Winterfell, finally, in the early morning hours.  Stannis is somewhat at a loss.

How is he to do this?  He has tools for dealing with Lord Stark – books, papers, even notes in Lord Arryn’s writing, as close to a testimonial as he is going to get – and he rehearsed his opening speech for hours stuck in the snow.  But everything is now overshadowed by a more practical concern: what is he going to do with Maekon?

Jahaerys and Alysanne had visited Winterfell, he knows.  Records of the Good Queen and the New Gift had contained precious little information, however, on where Silverwing had _slept._  

Even landing proves a problem.  In the dim light, Winterfell is a mass of towers, courtyards, and trees.  More by his own choice than Stannis’, Maekon settles to the ground in a thin strip of dirt between two walls.  They’ve circled long enough that alerting Lord Stark is less of a problem; Stannis has barely pulled his hook from the harness before he is confronted by a line of men with spears.

“I come on urgent business to see the Lord of Winterfell,” he informs the nearest man.  He nearly ruins the effect with a fall from the harness when Maekon turns beneath him, snapping his jaws at the guards.  “Fetch Lord Stark, and fetch meat for my dragon.”

His orders are obeyed quickly.  He is locking the last chain onto Maekon’s harness when Lord Stark arrives.  Stannis turns to greet him, then pauses.  Lord Stark looks like a man who has just been dragged out of bed before sunrise, as well he might, but there is something else in the shadows of his face.  Something close to fear.

“Prince Stannis.”  And Stannis likes his tone even less than his face.  Something has gone wrong here.  “My men will see you to your chambers.  Break your fast.”  Stark’s eyes flicker in the torchlight, searching Stannis’ face.  “I will await your … business in my solar.”

-

That is all of it.  Lord Eddard might as well not have bothered to leave his bed.  He’s gone in a sweep of cloak, not waiting for a reply, and Stannis seethes.  Winterfell men surround him like jailors, pushing him up to a mercifully quiet room.  A maid brings him oaty, inedible porridge.

_I should have gone straight to Robert._

It’s too late for that now, though, too late for regret.  He finishes the wretched porridge, and pulls fresh clothes from his saddlebag.  His boots and cloak are dusty wrecks, but he didn’t come here for the sake of _fashion._   He takes the books, the notes, and the saddlebag, and opens the door.  He wants to stride to Stark’s solar like a true prince would, wrathful and dangerous, but in this mess of a castle he would likely stride angrily into the kitchens.  Instead, he lets the guards lead him, grinding his teeth.

Stark’s solar is almost airy, and something in the line of the walls reminds him strikingly of Storm’s End. He blinks away a sudden glimpse of his father to see Lord Eddard instead, standing over the desk with his head down.  A tall woman, just behind him, must be his wife, and Stannis wonders what business the Lady Catelyn could have with him.  Surely Stark’s mood isn’t due to Brandon and Shireen.

Lady Catelyn inclines her head.  Lord Stark does not.  “Why did you come here, your grace?”

No formalities.  No hedging.  Perhaps this _wasn’t_ a mistake.  “House Baratheon is in grave danger.  The Queen is an adulterer, her children are bastards.  Lord Arryn was murdered –“

“Lord Arryn was murdered.”  This from Lady Catelyn.  Her hand is on her husband’s shoulder.

Lord Stark stares at Stannis.  “We received word from King’s Landing.  Lord Arryn-“ he chokes down the rest of the sentence.  “I would hear your explanation of _this.”_

Stannis steps forward, peering at a letter on the desk.  The words swim.  “…Gibberish.”

Lady Catelyn reaches out for the paper. “A letter from my sister. Encoded.”

“Prince Stannis.”  Again, for a moment, Stannis sees his father.  Stark’s eyes are ice.  “Answer me.  Swear it.  Did you murder Jon Arryn?”

The world goes still.

Stannis cannot breath.  _Lady Arryn.  Why would Lady Arryn think I murdered her husband?_   But that’s the wrong question, he realizes suddenly.  Who _wanted_ Lady Arryn to think that he murdered Lord Arryn?    Surely the Queen couldn’t have that kind of hold over her.  And the poison – but had there ever been any poison?  Even the man in the tower must have been planted, not to kill his dragon, simply to make him panic.  And Robert – who has spoken to Robert?  His brother might forgive him careless words, bitter arguments, even daring to find a dragon, but Robert would never forgive him Jon Arryn’s death.

He feels sweat down the back of his neck.  _All for nothing.  All for nothing._ If he flees – again – it is as good as swearing to his guilt.  If he stays, he will die, and Maekon will die, and far worse than that, a bastard will sit Robert’s throne.

Lady Stark has her hand on her husband’s arm.  They look towards Stannis, waiting.  His fist clenches.

“I did not kill Lord Arryn.” He holds Lord Stark’s gaze.  _Swear it._   Like a thief in a courtroom.  It galls at him.  “I swear by the honor of my House, _I did not kill him._   Look.”  He pulls a sheaf of papers from the bag at his side.  “This is his writing, and mine.  He saw it even before I did, and the Lannisters killed him for it.  They sought to kill me, as well, but now I see they found it easier to frame me for their crimes.”  He’s breathing heavily, and a few of the older papers tear as he flings them down to the desk.

Lord Stark looks down, and takes one of the pages in his hand.

“If what you say is true, what reason would my sister have to frame you?”  Lady Catelyn’s eyes are narrowed.  “She would not lie to me.  Not about something like this.”

Stannis has no sister, but he cannot imagine they are more honest than brothers.  He tries for something conciliating, but his anger makes it difficult.  “I do not know Lady Arryn’s _reasons._ She may have been deceived.”

“This is Lord Arryn’s hand,” says Lord Stark, stopping them both.  “That he worked with you on this, then, I do not doubt.  But if you mean to lie to me, then you may well have lied to him, and killed him when he found the lie.”

“I do not lie,” Stannis spits. 

Lady Catelyn steps between them.  “All we have is your word.”

“Yes,” says Stannis, and he glares into Stark’s eyes.  “ _You have my word.”_

Another moment, long and silent.  _Honorable Ned Stark,_ Robert had called him.  _Good old honest Ned._ He’d built a better brother in the empty air around him, and Stannis had seethed.  He had hated Stark for that, and he hates him now. 

Lord Stark takes his wife’s hand, and squeezes it.  “Prince Stannis,” he says, slowly.  “Show me what you found.”

-

“We must present this to his grace _together.”_   Lord Stark’s voice is iron.

Stannis had not truly thought to run.  Now that the worst of the panic has left him, he isn’t sure _what_ he’d thought to do.   He ought to have stayed at court, ought to have gone to Renly at Storm’s End, ought to have brought the truth to Robert long ago.

Does Lord Stark believe him?  Or is he telling Stannis what he wants to hear, keeping him at Winterfell until Robert can take his head?

 _I have your lord brother at Winterfell, and news for your ears alone._ The letter is dispatched by messenger, not raven.  Stannis is not a fool.  Lord Stark’s words would be the same whether he was prisoner or guest.

And which is he?

He must swear an oath through his teeth – _I will return –_ before he takes Maekon up.  At least Stark trusts his word, though Stannis has never been so tempted to break it.  He hates Winterfell now the way he once hated Dragonstone.

Lady Stark is nothing but cold courtesy.  She attempts at one point to draw Stannis into conversation about his daughter and wife.  Brandon, who Selyse prefers so greatly to Monterys Velaryon or Quentyn Martell, watches him in the training yard and asks him about his patch and hook.  He meets Stark’s bastard dragging the younger daughter away from Maekon’s pen.

Weeks drag on.  Cold winds and direwolf pups.  Finally, scouts bring word of the royal party.  Robert is coming.

-

“Wait here, your grace.”  Lord Stark puts an awkward hand on his arm before turning away.  Stannis stares around him.  Rows of stone Starks stretch on into the gloom.  They’ve stopped beside the image of a woman.  Lyanna Stark.  Of course Robert will come here.

It’s a poor place for reading.  Three candles barely illuminate _The Lineages_.  Stannis stumbles over the words he’s been preparing for weeks, finally slamming the tome shut in frustration.  There’s no sense in fear now.  As heavy footsteps come towards him, he tenses his shoulders, waiting for Robert’s shadow on the wall before sinking to one knee.

“Brother.”  Robert’s boots are muddy.  His voice is cold.

“Your grace.”  Stannis looks up.  Robert’s face is swallowed in beard and shadows.  “I have word for you that gravely concerns the realm.”  _We._ He should have said _we._

“Gods damn it, Stannis!”  Robert’s hands on his shoulders, whether to lift him up or strangle him.  Stannis falls back, landing heavily, staring up.  “If you don’t want me to think you a traitor, then stop bloody well _acting_ like one!”

Stannis tries to catch his breath.

“First half the court tries to tell me you’re a poisoner, and then you go and run like one!  And _Renly_ , under my feet, telling me Cersei’s made me a cuckold with one breath and swearing _you’d_ been murdered with the next!  I should have your _head,_ Stannis.  At least it would shut them all up.”

“Renly spoke the truth.”  Stannis shifts, taking the weight off his bad arm.  He doesn’t yet dare stand.  “Though I’m not murdered yet.”

“Ned?” says Robert.  Not Stannis.  Not the papers.  Not even Lord Arryn.  _Ned._

Stannis was right.

Lord Stark reaches down, picking up a leaf of paper.  “The proof is here,” he says.  His voice goes harsh and tight.  “They killed Jon Arryn for this, Robert.”

Stannis lays out his explanations, and for once Robert hangs on his every word.  Lord Stark chimes in occasionally – “remember Mya, in the Vale” – but their voices grow quieter as time wears on.  The tomb seems to be closing in around them, and outside, night must be falling.

“Who was it?”  Robert.  His eyes are fixed on a point just above Stannis’ shoulder, on Lyanna Stark’s stone face.  “Who did she bring to my bed?”  Paper tears in his fists.

“All evidence points to Ser Jaime.”  _All evidence._   He’d have given the rest of his arm for another week with Lord Arryn.  _All evidence_ won’t mean much to Tywin Lannister.

Robert slams a fist into the wall.  “The damned Kingslayer.”  He gives a broken laugh.  “Her damned brother.  I’ll slit his throat.”  He shifts, turning back towards the stairs.  “Where are her bastards, Ned?”  There’s a break in his voice as he says it.  It must be anger.  It cannot possibly be tears.

Lord Stark is another statue, hard and grey as stone.  “Under my guard.”

“What?”

“Under my guard,” Stark repeats.  “Safe.  Send the boys to the Wall, Myrcella to the Faith.”  He’s in front of Robert now.  “Robert.  Your grace.  They bear none of their mother’s guilt.”

_Under guard._

He hasn’t considered the rest of the royal party.  _Under guard._ Then they’ll suspect, they’ll _know._ The Kingslayer is the best sword-arm in the West.  The Queen is a clever woman.  How many Lannister guards did they bring with them?

Lord Stark and the King are locked in a silent staredown.  Robert’s face is red.  Stannis opens his mouth to speak, and then he hears it.

A dragon’s scream.

-

He flings himself up the stairs, out into the night, past Stark and Robert, past the stares of servants and guards.  He trips on an upraised flagstone, tries to catch himself, feels the stone hit his hook, hit his face.  Blood on them both.  He scrambles up again, heedless of pain or dignity.

Maekon screams again.

He’s chained, he’s tightly chained.  Each child and fool in Winterfell has wanted to see the dragon.  He’s in the ruins of a tower, a space scarcely big enough to turn around, because they’d needed the thick fortress walls.  The Lannisters have swords and the Lannisters have gold and there are ways to kill a dragon.

“Maekon,” he yells, like a fool.  He hadn’t worn a sword to see the King, just a knife in his boot.  There’s a crowd following him, now.  He can hear his brother shouting.

“Maekon!”

The doors are open.  The tower floor rotted centuries ago, leaving Maekon his shallow dragonpit, and Stannis catches himself just before he falls.

Stannis sees his dragon.  He cannot breath.

Maekon is shaking, shuddering, black blood in the dim light.  Stannis cannot tell how badly he is wounded.  Beneath a tangle of claws, Stannis sees a broken thing in white armor.

“Easy, Maekon.”  One eye.  The dragon twists his head about, and Stannis can see only one eye alight in the gloom.  Everywhere, still, the steam and stench of blood.

The dragon’s wail this time is quieter.  Stannis reaches out a hand, but doesn’t quite dare touch him.  “Hold, dragon.  Hold.”

Maekon brings his nose up, towards Stannis’ hand.  His jaw is slightly open, and his scales shudder.  _Pain._ Stannis remembers the Greyjoy Rebellion, scorpion bolts and reavers.  And the crowd outside now, roiling, shouting, creeping ever closer.  Stannis hoists himself down, and begins to loose the chains.

He _must_ get Maekon out of Winterfell.

As if to punctuate this thought, Maekon snaps his jaws at the men peering in around the doorframe.  He twists away from Stannis, lashing out with his tail.

Three chains gone, and Maekon almost beyond control.  Stannis wraps the two connected to the harness around his bad arm, and pulls himself up.  No saddle, the bare-bones of the harness.

“Get back!” he shouts at the crowd.  “Damn you, get back!”

Guardsmen, now, Winterfell colors.  They push the gawkers back, all but one.  Robert stands, head tilted up, regarding Maekon with interest.  “That was my kill, beast.”  His gaze turns to Stannis, hardens.  “Will he live?”

“Likely.”  Stannis bites it out.  “He needs to fly, or he’ll kill someone.”  _Like the very large man standing right in front of him._   He pulls back harder.

Robert glares at him for far too long.  Stannis can feel Maekon’s muscles bunching.  “Your grace-“

“This time you’d better be _back._ ”

Stannis has time for a nod, no time for an oath.  Maekon launches himself into the sky.

-

They come to rest, finally, in an open field, turned gray by the first hints of the sun.  Stannis barely has the strength to push himself off Maekon’s back.  His muscles ache, and his face is tacky with dried blood.  He pulls a canteen from the saddlebag, and wipes the worst of it from his eye before checking Maekon’s wounds.

There are sword slashes on his chest, already beginning to heal, and a deep wound from a smaller blade between two of his talons.  Jaime Lannister had fought until the end.  Stannis has nothing but the water to clean them with.

The worst is the eye.  As Stannis had feared, it’s past healing.  He’ll have to find some way to clean the socket, but that can’t be done here.

“Two good eyes between us, dragon.”  It’s nonsense.  He speaks it aloud, and finds himself smiling.  There’s no one here to hear him.  “I suppose Lady Shireen might design you a patch.”

Maekon, now nose-deep in a sheep carcass, pays him no mind.  Stannis takes a few coppers from the saddlebag, and then, on impulse, a silver stag.  He sets them carefully on a stump for the shepherd to find.

He turns back to Maekon, and is hit by the sudden, wild wish to fly away from here, away from Winterfell and Robert.  They could see the Wall, the Summer Isles.  They could conquer a kingdom, if he wished, free slaves, chase pirates.  They could be free.

He snorts out a laugh, closes his eyes, and lets it fade.  He hasn’t had daydreams that foolish since he was a boy.

But a smile keeps creeping its way back onto his mouth.  The weight is gone from his shoulders.  There might well be civil war to come, will at least be politics and explosions of anger and a week of – likely rose-studded – wedding feasts.  But he’ll meet them, without this secret hanging over him.  He’ll meet them, even, with his brothers at his side – for however long that lasts.

“Up,” he tells Maekon.  “My brother expects us at Winterfell.”

And they fly out into the dawn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I finished it! I haven't finished a real multi-chapter fic since my Star Wars days.
> 
> Thanks so much to everyone who read and left comments. This was a ton of fun.


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